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The anatomy of England: A history in ten matches
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Jonathan Wilson, London, Orion Books, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-4091-1820-6
The idea of the book is to chart the ups and downs of the England national football team in ten chapters (plus prologue and epilogue), each based on a seminal England game. The first is Spain v England 1929 and the last is England v Croatia 2007. I had not heard of the 1929 and 1948 games. The other eight were very familiar to me.
The ten games were chosen because “they highlight wider trends in the English game or because they lie on the fault lines of history, marking the end of one era and the beginning of the next”.
While the chapter is ostensibly about one game, it also sets the context of game and its significance as well as charting the significant events over the past 5-10 years prior to the game. That has the effect that most of each chapter is a kind of parenthesis!
For me the biggest weakness in the book is the copious quotations from contemporary newspaper reports. Whether newspaper match reports are worth reading next day is questionable, the interest that they hold 30-50 years after the event is for the reviewer less than none! I got to the stage where I skipped all quotes from newspaper match reports.
I was also baffled by Wilson’s obsession with the tactical ideas of Charles Reep and the amount of space on 21 separate pages that is given to them.
The book has some great lines. When Emlyn Hughes, straight from the restart (England v West Germany 1972) dribbled forward and had a shot, Wilson comments “has any player ever better encapsulated the brainless enthusiasm of the British game”. I loved that!
Overall I was not convinced.