In the 1971/72 season, Hunter Davies, hitherto best known as a
biographer of the Beatles, was given unprecendented access to the
training, dressing room and private lives of the players and staff
of Tottenham Hotspur. The book was an instant hit and time has not
withered its entertainment value, but it has revealed just how the
game has changed. The Spurs players 1972 were comfortably off, not
fabulously wealthy like today's stars, and were unsure of their
place in the pecking order - can anyone imagine david Beckham
earnestly joing the local Rotary Club in the hope of local
acceptance as Mike England, the Spurs captain, did? The players are
endearingly honest, almost naively so, Alan Mullery for example
reveals the depth of his hurt at being forced out to Fulham, Steve
Perryman, at the start of a record career at the club, is a
boyscout figure and Martin Peters's wife reveals how
under-appreciated her husband feels. At the time, such revelations
were controversial, now they are footnotes to a book that is a
football classic. (Kirkus UK)
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. Davies spent a whole season
with the team, training with them, visiting the players' homes and
witnessing the dressing-room confrontations. In the modern era of
painstaking media management and tight security, no sportswriter
will ever again be granted such unprecedented access. While some
features of the game have changed beyond all recognition - notably
the all-consuming role that money now plays - inside every club the
dramas and tensions revealed by Davies remain, making the book a
timeless classic and securing its position as one of the best books
about football ever written.
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