Soccer books

Emmet Malonelooks at the year's best soccer books

Make no mistake, it's been a bad year for football biographies. So bad, in fact, that the publishers of John Terry's memoirs have reportedly decided to shelve the project indefinitely in the wake of disastrous ventures into an already hopelessly overcrowded market by the likes of Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole.

Before taking on the Rooney project, Hunter Davies, an experienced and respected veteran of the genre, wrote a piece for a British paper in which he said he had only agreed to write the youngster's memoirs once he had been assured the striker had something to say and would allow him, Davies, to say it on his behalf.

It was a nice thought but nothing much about the finished article suggests that the Manchester United star delivered on either score. Paul McGrath, on the other hand, could scarcely have given Vincent Hogan stronger material with which to work. In Back from the Brink(Century, RRP €28 but widely discounted), which won both of this year's Irish Sports Book of the Year awards, the former international bares a soul deeply scarred by a painfully unsettled early childhood and a long battle with alcoholism.

The football here serves largely as a backdrop for McGrath's many personal difficulties, just about all of which are relayed to the reader with honesty and a good deal of understandable regret. The material is sensitively handled by Hogan, who has spoken with many of the major figures in McGrath's personal life and professional career.

The result is a stark and often disturbing account of how one of the country's most loved public figures was failed, first by a system supposed to look after him and then, because of his frailties, by football managers preoccupied with their own survival or success.

Alex Ferguson's somewhat apologetic observations on a player he eventually moved out of Old Trafford after initial attempts at reform are particularly interesting, and if there is a problem with the book generally it is with entirely accepting that what we are offered here is the authentic voice of either the painfully shy McGrath or, in an early chapter, his mother. It is, nevertheless, a fine achievement - one that highlights the shortcomings of the year's offerings from current players - and a very good read.

Elsewhere, Daire Whelan and Patrick West choose as their topics the fate of Irish football at home and the country's elite footballers abroad respectively. The former faithfully chronicles the decline of the League of Ireland in Who Stole Our Game?(Gill and Macmillan, €15) while the latter takes a look at the careers of our most successful footballing exports to Britain in How the Irish Conquered English Soccer(Liberties Press, €15).

Whelan's book is based on interviews with many of the game's leading figures here and provides a strong sense of just how and why things have declined so dramatically over the last 50 years. His account of the political infighting and hopeless organisation that have historically dogged the game here is well put, while most of the FAI's crazier days down the years are recalled in illuminating detail.

Ultimately, though, he does rather fall into the same trap as the club officials he criticises by failing to display any vision for the future and settling instead for expressing, with reservations, the hope that the current FAI supremo, John Delaney, can sort things out instead. West's book, meanwhile, tackles the similarly worthwhile job of setting the careers of many of our leading footballers during much the same time-frame in the social context of the Britain in which they played.

Finally, after a year in which the Italian game endured major scandal and huge success, two books that focus (at least in part) on the game there. First up is our own Paddy Agnew, whose Forza Italia: A Journey in Search of Italy and its Football(€16) is a highly readable outsider's account of the country and its game. Agnew recounts the many challenges he encountered since moving with his wife to the country and sets out to explore his adopted home's political and footballing culture.

The lines, of course, are often blurred but the results are entertaining and insightful. Former Chelsea boss Gianluca Vialli (along with journalist Gabriele Marcotti) sets out to compare the English and Italian games in The Italia Job: A Journey to the Heart of Two Great Footballing Cultures(Bantam Press, €27). His own analysis is surprisingly interesting, although the book, the only one involving football to make the shortlist for the British sports book of the year award, is also worthwhile for the many contributions of others such as Arsène Wenger, Alex Ferguson and his former Chelsea team-mate, Marcel Desailly who amongst other things observes that: "To me, all English referees look the same". Best of the rest: Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmosby Gavin Newsham (Atlantic, €13); The History of the FIFA World Cupby Chris Hunt (Interactive, €29); Pele: the Autobiography(Simon and Schuster, €27) and The Ball is Round: A Global History of Footballby David Goldblatt (Viking €45).