A jewel of a book

For all of you out there who like a good read and love football, but are tired of biogs, I can't reccomend highly enough Harry Pearsons (a smoggie) book 'The Far Corner'. I've got a dog-eared copy that's been read many a time, so many times in fact I know whats coming on very page, but it's still one of the most enjoyable reads about footy ever. It's about North East football, but you don't have to be from the NE to apprecaite it. The great thing is, the big clubs don't take up the lions share of the book - it's mostly about little clubs like Crook, Esh Winning, Spartans, Langley Park etc. etc. Do yourself a favour, if you've never heard of this book, get yourself a copy. You'll love it and it'll be a freind forever.

A couple of tasters:

When I moved back to the North East the one thing that really surprised me was the people's love of football. A decade away had led me to beleive that it was all a myth. From my vantage point in the South I had regarded it all with detached amusement, snickering up my sleeve when I heard the phrase 'a hot bed of soccer' and chortling like a chipmunk when some chucklehead advanced the view that 'Geordie' fans were second to none. But after a week back I realised I was wrong.
I found a copy of Newcastle United - A complete record in the Royal family section of the local W.H.Smiths.
I went to get a haircut and the barber said: 'I don't go to football as much these days. I go to most of Newcastle's home matches, some of the reserve games, a few of the youth team's and if Carlisle are playing midweek I'll pop along there. Mind you, I used to be a right fanatic.'

A retired farmer I met on the riverbank said: 'It was just after the war, versus Sunderland, there was over sixty thousand in and I made the mistake of getting up against one of them barriers. And every time Newcastle attacked the crowd came forward and down I went, bent double over the barrier. I never saw the ball but twice, and only then when it were fifty foot in the air. And when we got off the bus in Consett I had to walk three miles back home in the pitch black and a foot of smow.'He grinned, shaking his head. 'And I said to myself ''Way, y'bugger.''

If anyone brought football to the North East it was the Roman Legions. In it's hey-day around Hadrians wall was the most militarised areas of the Roman Empire. That the legionaires played a particularaly nasty form of soccer is well known. As a result, the citizens of South Shields, Corbridge and the other garrison towns along the wall were treated to live Italian football some 2,000 years before Channel 4 brought it to the rest of the country.

There was a michievous neatness about Peter Beardsley - part Jack Russel, part Jack Buchanan. He passed sharply and decisively, and he had a way of dummying over the ball with a wiggle of his right knee that reminded of a club comic imitating Elvis. The thing I liked best about Beardsley, though, was that when he ran with the ball you caught a glimpse on his face of the joy of the thing; a reminder of those same moments when, as a kid, you went round a defender, or ran onto a pass, and all there seemed to be were acres of grass, and as the adrenaline kicked into your system you got that bio-chemically ignorant childhood feeling that you could go on charning with that ball forever and ever and never run out of breath. Then some thunder-thighed numbskull would lumber up and give you a dead leg.

I'm sure that other not 606ers that are in the know and have enjoyed it will confirm just how good it is.

 

Can you do it here in installments. I will continue to hand out rep. for each episode. It gave me a wee tingle to read. (honestly)

 

Second that Genghis

 

Rep.

 

Much as I do like you all very much, my freinds, if you think I'm sitting on this computer typing out a whole friggin book for your amusement, rep or no rep, you've got another thing coming! Anyway, how tight are you lot ? You can probably get a copy on Amazon for 5p!

Just to show you that I'm not entirely cold hearted, I'll add the following:

After I left school I worked as a barman in a Cleveland hotel. The place had pretensions to being more than a mere pub. There were nuts and olives in saucers on the bar top, veal cordon bleu on the menu and we had a cocktail list. One day a man came in and ordered a pint and a pousse-cafe, adding 'for our lass' in case I thought he was a ballet dancer or something. Pousse-cafe is a generic term for a cocktail in which a variety of liqueurs of differing densities are floated one on top of another. The type we served was made of creme de menthe, yellow chartreuse and cherry brandy. It was called the traffic light because the colours lined up red, amber and green. It takes patience and a steady hand to make such a cocktail and when you have done so successfully there is a feeling of quiet satisfaction. I carried the finished drink carefully to the bar and set it down in front of the man, a faint air of smugness about my callow cheeks. The man eyed my haniwork suspiciouslly for a moment, then stuck his little finger in and swirled it around. So much for serving drinks from the Savoy Cocktail Book on Teeside.
My view of North East football owes something to the pousse-cafe. It is euqal parts cynicism, sentimentallity and sarkiness. I'm not sure which floats to the top most readily, though the laws of physics dictate that it must be the one with the highest sugar content. In writing this book I have, like the man in the bar, endeavoured to stir the ingredients into a whole. If at times the mixture has separated rather too obviouslly into it's component parts then I can only blame surface tension.
The Far Corner is an account of my travels around the region's football grounds during the 1993-4 season. My criterion for choosing which games to attend was a complex equation based on historic importance, cultural significance and how much money I had for busfares. From the outset my plan was to be as random and haphazard as possible, and it must be said that, save for one minor lapse when I wrote the Whickham v Bamber Bridge FA Vase tie in my diary three weeks in advance, I stuck to this slap-happy stategy with a bulldog tenacity. The idiotic opinions espoused in these pages are entirely my own (except, of course, when they are quotations from club chairmen and officials) and though there may be times when I wander well away from the facts about football in the North East, I hope I have never strayed too far from it's spirit.

My grandfather took a pencil from a cup on the mantlepiece which propped up his pools coupon. He opened the raod atlas deilberately, flicked through it, pausing for some reason over a street map of Bristol. Eventually he found the North East. Pressing the book open and using the pencil as a pointer he showed me Ashington. He did not stop there. Soon the pencil was tapping other towns and villages. Every one of them had some footballing significance,a history, a tale attached: Crook (once beat Barcelona), Gateshead (Hughie Gallagher committed suicide there), West Auckland (won the first World Cup), Esh Winning (birthplace of Raich Carter), Cockfield (the wonder village), Durham (sold George Cmsell to the 'Boro), Bishop Auckland (best ameteur team in history), Hazelrigg Colliery (where Len Shackelton worked), South Bank (little Wilf Mannion). My Grandfathers hand circled the map, stirring up soccer wherever it went.

That's yer lot, hope I've whetted your collective appetites.

 

Much as I do like you all very much, my freinds, if you think I'm sitting on this computer typing out a whole friggin book for your amusement, rep or no rep, you've got another thing coming! Anyway, how tight are you lot ? You can probably get a copy on Amazon for 5p!


SELF SELF SELF

 

1p plus £2.80 delivery!

 

£ 2.81 ! - go on, throw fiscal caution to the wind !!

 

Reading Jonathan Wilson's Inverting the Pyramid
Not about Newcastle or anything, just about how football has developed and spread through the world.. might sound a bit dull but it's really good!
Reccommend it
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inverting-P...2041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299329156&sr=8-1

 

Good read, may well buy it

 

I'm reading a copy of Razzle...