Yet what sets The Soccer Syndrome apart from most first-person accounts on the beautiful game is how he lifts the mundane football occurrence to something vivid and unique. “We play what might be called LSD soccer,” Moynihan wrote of Sunday League football, of which he was a keen advocate, “a pleasure only for the participants.”

Glory Game by Hunter Davies - World Soccer Talk The Glory Game by Hunter Davies - World Soccer Talk

But this book was a unique opportunity for the author, who had not written a football book prior to this. With the start of the Seventies being a time of change not only in football, but in society itself, the attitudes are very different from today, but in other regards, some are not that different. The beliefs on the social side leaves a bit to be desired, but the frailties and worries of the players are probably not that different to those of today’s superstars. Spurs players signed for big money are concerned about being able to live up to the price tag and are depressed when not playing – either because of injury or being dropped. Davies was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, to Scottish parents. For four years his family lived in Dumfries until Davies was aged 11. Davies has quoted his boyhood hero as being football centre-forward, Billy Houliston, of Davies' then local team, Queen of the South. [1] Staggeringly raw and uncompromisingly revealing. I was expecting some unconvenient truths about the game to be shown, but the ammount of darkness that this book portrays still surprised me. I know that you're not supposed to apply your own moral standars on past times, and the 70's had things our time doesn't but still: the energy around Spurs in '72 comes across as outright destructive. Davies mercilessly shows how the players suffer not only from their own fears and prejudices, but also from the reactionary, judgemental and emotionally arid culture around them. As a Spurs fan I've learned to consider Bill Nicholson a "club legend", but after reading Davies' depiction of his almost pathological criticism of people around him, and his contempt of weakness and vulnerability, I feel less inclined to do so. I don't know if things have gotten better since then at Spurs and clubs like them, but in any case I'm glad I wasn't there. Whitehead, Richard (10 November 2003). "Writes of passage". The Times. London . Retrieved 4 May 2010. (subscription required) When the first edition of The Glory Game was published in 1972, it was instantly hailed as the most insightful book about the life of a football club ever published. Hunter Davies was, and still is, the only author ever to be allowed into the inner sanctum of a top-level football team (Tottenham Hotspur) and his pen spared nothing and no one. 'His accuracy is sufficiently uncanny to be embarrassing,' wrote Bob Wilson in the New Statesman. 'Brilliant, vicious, unmerciful,' wrote The Sun.a b "Hunter Davies". Qosfc.com. 26 September 2009. Archived from the original on 29 June 2015 . Retrieved 20 November 2013. There is no way that a writer these days could possibly do what I did in The Glory Game,” explains Hunter Davies. “He or she wouldn’t be able to get past the minefield of agents, lawyers and officials.”

The Glory Game: The New Edition of the British Football

I’d originally been told that as a club, Spurs would be completely unapproachable, and that Nicholson would be dour and difficult,” recalled Davies. “He was completely cooperative though, and when I informed the players that I would keep 50% of the royalties and split the other half equally between them, they were happy too. It wasn’t a huge amount of money though!” In children's literature, he has written the Ossie, Flossie Teacake and Snotty Bumstead series of novels.The scope of the book is not only restricted to what goes on within the club. The fans feature heavily, with hooliganism starting to rear its head and with the author being in amongst it, there are some vivid tales of the aggro that used to regularly take place on the terraces and the lads who perpetrated it are all wrapped in as part of the match-day experience. Conn is no nostalgic who believes the ’80s were a golden period – to him Wimbledon’s FA Cup triumph in 1988 was not so much a wonderful fairy tale as a victory for thuggery – but he is appalled by the descent of the game into rampant, barely regulated commercialism. “I think the end of the sharing of gate receipts in 1983 was the first break,” he says.