50th anniversary edition of the story of the team that caused the last, great FA Cup upset... 'Times have changed but this book is an engrossing reminder for all fans' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'As essential piece of British football history for fans of any club. Brilliantly researched and written with an undisguised passion' Guy Mowbray, BBC's Match of the Day Today, it seems inconceivable that a team from the lower reaches of the Championship could beat the likes of Chelsea or Manchester United in the FA Cup Final. Yet, on 5 May 1973 that is exactly what happened. Six months earlier, Bob Stokoe took on an ailing Sunderland team, struggling at the bottom of the second division. But the long road to Wembley sees them beating Arsenal and Manchester City to reach the final, where they face Don Revie's mighty Leeds United in a game few expect them to win. Yet what lies ninety minutes ahead is the greatest FA Cup Final shock of all time. Sunderland's victory was, arguably, the last fairytale of recent footballing times. In STOKOE, SUNDERLAND AND '73, Lance Hardy talked with all the Sunderland players who turned out at Wembley that day and to the family of Bob Stokoe, to produce the definitive account of an unforgettable game.

This title introduces soccer fans to the history of one of the top MLS clubs, Toronto FC. The title features informative sidebars, exciting photos, a timeline, team facts, a glossary, and an index.

In their early years, the Chicago Bears and the Chicago Cardinals-two of the longest-lived teams in football-travelled the country with only rare mention in the newspapers. Both teams later saw their official records destroyed by fire. Most of what is now known about them is based on often inaccurate statements made many years later. Reconstructing their missing history, this book draws on newly available resources to document the battles and brawls both on and off the field, the cunning backroom deals, the financial woes and the 40-year rivalry that endured while both teams were in Chicago. Figures like Al Capone, Red Grange, Jim Thorpe and Bronko Nagurski make appearances in the unearthed lore of two old adversaries whose uneasy alliance helped ensure the survival of the fledgling NFL.

_________ 'WE ARE LIVERPOOL - THIS MEANS MORE.' JUERGEN KLOPP Allez Allez Allez is the inside account of Liverpool FC during the Klopp era, including the 2018/19 campaign which saw the club compete in the most gripping Premier League title race in history and become Champions of Europe for the sixth time. Featuring access to management, players and staff, Allez Allez Allez explains how Liverpool have emerged from what Jurgen Klopp described as the "depression" of 2015 to achieve feats that have eluded an entire generation of supporters. Through original research and exclusive interviews, Simon Hughes takes readers into Melwood, the club's training ground, and behind the dressing room door. He takes them to Chapel Street, where the club's business is determined, and to America, where it is owned. He takes them into Anfield, where many of the most important moments are defined, and he takes them on to the pitches of the Premier League and the Champions League, as we revisit how Liverpool stormed their way to the top of the Premier League this season.

'We spent all our time surrounded by police cordons and barbed wire, never mind having our bus hijacked.' - Tommy Bedford, Springboks No. 8 2019 and 2020 mark the fiftieth anniversary of the controversial 1969/70 Springbok rugby tour of the British Isles - a landmark event on both a sporting and political level. Taking place during the time of South Africa's apartheid dispensation, the tour was characterised throughout by violent demonstrations against the 'ambassadors of apartheid'. Scenes of chanting demonstrators at the players' hotels and airports were not uncommon, nor was the sight of protesters being dragged off the field of play by police. Smoke bombs and flour bombs also became a match-day fixture. These were wild and unnerving times for the players on tour, whose movements were badly inhibited and who had to play hide-and-seek to avoid possible violence between games of rugby. During a demanding tour that lasted more than three months and took them to and fro between England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, they endeavoured to sustain a proud tradition of highly successful Springbok tours through the Isles. Through personal interviews with the players, including team captain Dawie de Villiers, vice-captain Tommy Bedford and other senior members of the squad, as well as key figures such as anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain, Rugby Behind Barbed Wire takes readers into the inner circle of a besieged group of sportsmen who just wanted to play rugby despite concerted efforts to deny them. The author also looks at the political context of events, and why so many felt that disrupting the tour was a matter of moral and political necessity.

In 1932 laundry-store tycoon George Preston Marshall became part owner of the Boston Braves franchise in the National Football League. To separate his franchise from the baseball team, he renamed it the Redskins in 1933 and then in 1937 moved his team to Washington DC, where the team won two NFL championships over the next decade. But it was off the field that Marshall made his lasting impact. An innovator, he achieved many "firsts" in professional football. His team was the first to telecast all its games, have its own fight song and a halftime show, and assemble its own marching band and cheerleading squad. He viewed football as an entertainment business and accordingly made changes to increase scoring and improve the fan experience. But along with innovation, there was controversy. Marshall was a proud son of the South, and as the fifties came to a close, his team remained the only franchise in the three major league sports to not have a single black player. Marshall came under pressure from Congress and the NFL and its president, Pete Rozelle, as league expansion and new television contract possibilities forced the issue on the reluctant owner. Outside forces finally pushed Marshall to trade for Bobby Mitchell, the team's first black player, in 1962. With the story of Marshall's holdout as the backdrop, Fight for Old DC chronicles these pivotal years when the NFL began its ascent to the top of the nation's sporting interest.

He stayed out of the spotlight, but Leafs fans know J.P. Bickell cast a long shadow. A self-made mining magnate and the man who kept the Maple Leafs in Toronto and financed Maple Leaf Gardens, J.P. Bickell lived an extraordinary and purposeful life. As one of the most important industrialists in Canadian history, Bickell left his mark on communities across the nation. He was a cornerstone of the Toronto Maple Leafs, which awards the J.P. Bickell Memorial Award to recognize outstanding service to the organization. Bickell's story is also tied up with some of the most famous Canadians of his day, including Mitchell Hepburn, Roy Thomson, and Conn Smythe. Through his charitable foundation, he has been a key benefactor of the Hospital for Sick Children, and his legacy continues to transform Toronto. Yet, though Bickell was so important both to Toronto and the Maple Leafs, the story of his incredible life is today largely obscure. This book sets the record straight, presenting the definitive story of his rise to prominence and his lasting legacy - on the ice and off.

Home of the legendary Tar Heels basketball team, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill enjoys a sporting brand known the world over. The alma mater of Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm, winner of forty national championships in six different sports, and a partner in what Sporting News calls "the best rivalry in sports," UNC-Chapel Hill is a colossus of college athletics. Now, it has become ground zero in the debate on how the $16 billion college sports industry operates--an industry that coexists uneasily within a university system professly dedicated to education and research. Written by notorious UNC athletics department whistleblower, Mary Willingham, and her close faculty ally, Jay Smith, Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports exposes the fraudulent inner workings that for decades have allowed barely literate basketball and football players to take fake courses, earning fake degrees from one of the nation's top universities while faculty and administrators looked the other way. In unobscured detail, Cheated recounts the academic fraud in UNC's athletic department, even as university leaders attempted to sweep the matter under the rug in order to keep the billion-dollar college sports revenue machine functioning, and it makes an impassioned argument that the"student-athletes" in these programs are being cheated of what, after all, has been promised them from the start--a college education.

John Fallon remains one of Celtic's great characters and is a lifelong supporter of the club. Now, for the first time, this Celtic legend tells the fascinating inside story of his career in football and his years with the club. Fallon joined Celtic in the late 1950s when the club was struggling, saw a fair amount of the desperate days of 1963 and 1964 but was there at the start of the glory years when Celtic won the Scottish Cup in 1965. He shared in good and bad times with the club, was the substitute goalkeeper at the European Cup Final in Lisbon in 1967, and was suddenly called into action in South America when Ronnie Simpson was felled by a missile - and performed brilliantly. He hit a low point in 1968 after one bad game against Rangers at the New Year, but fought back gloriously to play his part in the incredible month of April 1969 when Celtic won all three Scottish domestic trophies in one calendar month. It is a career he is rightly proud of and now John Fallon reveals the inside story and some brand new insights into his relationship with Jock Stein and other members of the Lisbon Lions, which were not always straightforward.There are accounts of his dealings with opponents, the clashes with Rangers and with European opposition in what was a fantastic era for the game in Scotland. He also shares his opinions on the art of goalkeeping, the state of Celtic at the moment and the future of the game in Scotland.

One of the most influential and controversial team owners in professional sports history, Walter O'Malley (1903-79) is best remembered-and still reviled by many-for moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Yet much of the O'Malley story leading up to the Dodgers' move is unknown or created from myth, and there is substantially more to the man. When he entered the public eye, the self-constructed family background and early life he presented was gilded. Later his personal story was distorted by some New York sportswriters, who hated him for moving the Dodgers. In Mover and Shaker Andy McCue presents for the first time an objective, complete, and nuanced account of O'Malley's life. He also departs from the overly sentimentalized accounts of O'Malley as either villain or angel and reveals him first and foremost as a rational, hardheaded businessman, who was a major force in baseball for three decades and whose management and marketing practices radically changed the shape of the game.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . . then you're probably not a football fan. Years of underachievement. An heroic sense of injustice. A seemingly infinite capacity for self-destruction. John Crace and Spurs were made for each other. But then the team started to play like possible champions. For most fans, these are the glory moments they dream about. For Crace they just opened a new dimension of anxiety: the fear of success. Crace has supported Spurs for 40 years. His wife thinks he suffers from a psychiatric disorder, but fandom is not only one of the ways he negotiates his relationships, it also helps him make some sense of his life. Vertigo is the story of why fandom that starts out in boyish hope always ends in dark comedy.

This book chronicles the history of the Philadelphia Athletics, the first real dynasty in Major League Baseball. The focus of the book is the 1931 season, where Philadelphia, led by is superstar pitcher, Lefty Grove, had the best season in franchise history, leading to a third consecutive trip to the World Series. With a roster full of future Hall of Fame players like Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Jimmie Foxx, Connie Mack, and Lefty Grove, the Athletics were one of the best baseball teams of all time, and the 1931 season served as the apex of their success, as the financial restrictions of the Great Depression caused team ownership to break up the team.

Bill Struth is the most celebrated Manager in the history of Rangers Football Club. In his 34 year tenure, he led the club to 30 major trophies and nurtured many of the club's greatest players. To them, he was simply 'Mr. Struth' - a father figure who guided them with the principle that, '... to be a Ranger is to sense the sacred trust of upholding all that such a name means in this shrine of football.' If these words set the ideals for his players to attain, his own personal life was clouded by moments of indiscretion which were to influence the course of his life and career. Drawing on family accounts and Rangers archives, the book explores his early life in Edinburgh and Fife, as well as his celebrated years in Glasgow. It recounts his career in professional athletics and in football with Heart of Midlothian, Clyde and ultimately, Rangers. It reflects on the legacy of the Struth era and his influences that remain at Ibrox today.

Chicago in the Roaring Twenties was a city of immigrants, mobsters, and flappers with one shared passion: the Chicago Cubs. It all began when the chewing-gum tycoon William Wrigley decided to build the world's greatest ball club in the nation's Second City. In this Jazz Age center, the maverick Wrigley exploited the revolutionary technology of broadcasting to attract eager throngs of women to his renovated ballpark. Mr. Wrigley's Ball Club transports us to this heady era of baseball history and introduces the team at its crazy heart-an amalgam of rakes, pranksters, schemers, and choirboys who take center stage in memorable successes, equally memorable disasters, and shadowy intrigue. Readers take front-row seats to meet Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Joe McCarthy, Lewis "Hack" Wilson, Gabby Hartnett. The cast of characters also includes their colorful if less-extolled teammates and the Cubs' nemesis, Babe Ruth, who terminates the ambitions of Mr. Wrigley's ball club with one emphatic swing.

Colin Shindler first wrote of his deep love for Manchester City in Manchester United Ruined My Life. Now he tells the story of his sorrowful disenchantment with his home town club as, on the instruction of its new foreign owners, it turns itself remorselessly into a global brand. From the nail-biting victory over Gillingham 1999 to the equally dramatic winning of the Premier League in May 2012 Shindler watches as his team becomes more successful yet, to his own bewilderment, he feels increasingly alienated from the club. This is the story of a frustrated romantic who finds in the glitz and glamour of the current media-obsessed game a helter-skelter of artificially fabricated excitement. As he details how football courses through his veins, Shindler reveals how it intersects with his own life, a life that has been marked by family tragedy, and how he finally found personal redemption even as his team lost its soul.

By 1964 the storied St. Louis Cardinals had gone seventeen years without so much as a pennant. Things began to turn around in 1953, when August A. Busch Jr. bought the team and famously asked where all the black players were. Under the leadership of men like Bing Devine and Johnny Keane, the Cardinals began signing talented players regardless of colour, and slowly their star started to rise again. Drama and Pride in the Gateway City commemorates the team that Bing Devine built, the 1964 team that prevailed in one of the tightest three-way pennant races of all time and then went on to win the World Series, beating the New York Yankees in the full seven games. All the men come alive in these pages - pitchers Ray Sadecki and Bob Gibson, players Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Bobby Shantz, manager Johnny Keane, his coaches, the Cardinals' broadcasters, and Bill White, who would one day run the entire National League - along with the dramatic events that made the 1964 Cardinals such a memorable club in a memorable year.

A true story of hockey heartbreak, tragedy, and triumph. Sudden Death brings to life the incredible ongoing saga of the Swift Current Broncos hockey team. After a tragic game-day bus accident on December 30, 1986, left four of its star players dead, the first-year Western Hockey League team was faced with nearly insurmountable odds against not only its future success but its very survival. The heartbreaking story made headlines across North America, and the club garnered acclaim when it triumphantly rebounded and won the Canadian Hockey League’s prestigious Memorial Cup in 1989. Many of the surviving Broncos continued their successful hockey careers in the NHL, among them 2012 Hockey Hall of Famer Joe Sakic, Sheldon Kennedy, and Sudden Death co-author Bob Wilkie. Years later the Broncos’ tragedy-to-triumph tale was overshadowed when the team’s former coach, Graham James, was convicted of sexual assault against Sheldon Kennedy, Theoren Fleury, and Todd Holt, all of whom played for him.

On a rainy night in Gothenburg in May 1983 twelve young Scotsmen turned the footballing world on its head. Against all the odds, those players took on the might of Spanish giants Real Madrid, and beat them convincingly. Aberdeen were winners of the European Cup Winners Cup. The manager, Alex Ferguson, would go on to become one of the greats, his team Pittodrie legends. The tale of that season, the remarkable triumph in the Ullevi Stadium and of the men who made it possible has never fully been told - until now. "Glory In Gothenburg" goes behind the scenes, deep into the inner sanctum, and through a series of in-depth interviews with all the main characters reveals what made that side and those players so special and what drove them on to achieve unparalleled success. Thirty years later, the story remains one of the most astonishing in the history of Scottish football.

This is the first time that the story of Derby County's European matches has been fully documented in one place. It begins with the club's involvement in the Anglo-French Friendship Cup in the early 1960s through to the Texaco Cup in 1971, but then came the real drama of the European Cup, when the Rams beat the powerful Benfica on their way to a controversial semi-final meeting with Italian giants Juventus. Further featured matches include the Rams hammer Real Madrid and a record-breaking scoreline against the Irish part-timers Finn Harps, while the 1990s saw the reintroduction of the Anglo-Italian Cup and a Wembley appearance. Relive those spellbinding nights here in Andy Ellis's fascinating new book - every Derby County fan should own one.

Of all the teams in the annals of baseball, only a select few can lay claim to historic significance. One of those teams is the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, the first racially integrated Major League team of the twentieth century. The addition of Jackie Robinson to its roster changed not only baseball but also the nation. Yet Robinson was just one member of that memorable club, which included Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Pete Reiser, Duke Snider, Eddie Stanky, Arky Vaughan, and Dixie Walker. Also present was a quartet of baseball's most unforgettable characters: co-owners Branch Rickey and Walter O'Malley, suspended manager Leo Durocher, and radio announcer Red Barber. This book is the first to offer biographies of everyone on that incomparable team as well as accounts of the moments and events that marked the Dodgers' 1947 season: Commissioner Happy Chandler suspending Durocher, Rickey luring his old friend Burt Shotton out of retirement to replace Durocher, and brilliant outfielder Reiser being sidelined after running into a fence. In spite of all this, the Dodgers went on to win the National League pennant over the heavily favored St. Louis Cardinals. And of course, there is the biggest story of the season, where history and biography coalesce: Jackie Robinson, who overcame widespread hostility to become Rookie of the Year-and to help the Dodgers set single-game attendance records in cities around the National League.

In 1937, when local beer baron Emil Sick stepped in, the Seattle Indians were a struggling minor-league baseball team teetering on collapse. Moved to mix baseball and beer by his good friend and fellow brewer, New York Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, Sick built a new stadium and turned the team into a civic treasure. The Rainiers (newly named after the beer) set attendance records and won Pacific Coast League titles in 1939, '40, '41, '51, and '55. The story of the Rainiers spans the end of the Great Depression, World War II, the rise of the airline industry, and the incursion of Major League Baseball into the West Coast (which ultimately spelled doom for the club). It features well-known personalities such as Babe Ruth, who made an unsuccessful bid to manage the team; Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, who did manage the Rainiers; and Ron Santo, a batboy who went on to a storied career with the Chicago Cubs. Mixing traditional baseball lore with tales of mischief, "Pitchers of Beer" relates the twenty-seven-year history of the Rainiers, a history that captures the timeless appeal of baseball, along with the local moments and minutiae that bring the game home to each and every one of us. "Pitchers of Beer" showcases fifty-two photographs of players and memorabilia from noted Northwest baseball collector David Eskenazi.

Yorkshire County Cricket Club is by far the most successful county cricket club in history. Since the County Championship was constituted in 1890, Yorkshire has, in addition to one shared Championship, won it outright on 30 occasions and Yorkshire cricket supporters take great pride in the county's cricketing history. As well as the club's successes, there have been 42 Yorkshire players chosen as Wisden Cricketers of the Year. Many have been world-class cricketers such as Wilfred Rhodes, Len Hutton, Fred Trueman and Geoffrey Boycott, with distinguished England careers. Many thousands of Wisden pages have been filled with Yorkshire cricket, Yorkshire cricketers and Tests in Yorkshire. Wisden on Yorkshire is a fascinating journey mixing great matches, personalities, feats, controversies and unusual occurrences. Presenting the best Yorkshire info from the Almanack archives, Wisden on Yorkshire includes: Focus on the iconic Yorkshire players, such as Truman and Boycott Cricketers of the Year and Obituaries The County's history, highlighting significant years and extracts from reviews of those years Fascinating stories of both the highs and lows in the club's history colour plate section containing superb classic images Detailed records, match reports and scorecards

This chronicle of a year in the life of St Joseph's Doora-Barefield GAA club in Co. Clare - which won the William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year award for 2010 - breaks new ground in Irish sportswriting. Christy O'Connor, a national GAA correspondent who has also been the St Joseph's senior team goalkeeper for 20 years, tells this story with unflinching honesty: a fly-on-the-wall tale of the effort, agony and struggles that define the journey undertaken every season by every club side. This is grassroots GAA at its purest and rawest, a great story brilliantly told.