"God answers my prayers everywhere except on the golf-course."
A Man walks on to a football pitch
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Harry Rednapp, Ebury Press, 2014 ISBN 978 009 195 5526
The concept of this book is very simple. Harry Rednapp chooses the best 11 players from each decade from the 1950s right through to the modern age. That is quite interesting. But what makes the book is the asides and tangents. The reason why he chose Denis Law and not Geoff Hurst etc.
He speculates on many things: Is Gareth Bale better than Bobby Charlton? Would Duncan Edwards have kept Bobby Moore out of the 1966 England team had he lived?
There are fascinating insights: Did you know, for example, that Danny Blanchflower invented the defensive wall or that Jack Charlton was just about the first central defender to score goals from set plays? Well, did you?
The best bit of the book is player analysis: Harry reckons Des Walker would not be outstanding today because so much of his game was based on passing back to the goalkeeper, when it was still allowed. He speculates on how, in an era of dedicated goalkeeping coaches, we produce fewer great goalkeepers than in the past.
His analysis of how the Premier League has changed football for ever is very good. Spin-offs of this include how managers have become celebrities and that any player with international ambitions has to leave if his club is relegated from the Premier League.
He bemoans the pressure on managers: “The eighties was the last decade before the Premier League and probably the last time there was room to fail in football.” Noting how many great greats of the 1980s were spotted playing for lower league teams whereas few now reach the Premier League via that route, he comments: “I think the talent is still there in the lower divisions, but people just haven’t got the time to make it work, or the freedom to take a risk”.
An excellent read.