Recommended Reading

My Father and other Working-Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

ISBN-10: 0224072684

Synopsis (with thanks to Amazon)

Stewart Imlach was an ordinary neighbourhood soccer star of his time. A brilliant winger who thrilled the crowd on Saturdays, then worked alongside them in the off-season; who represented Scotland in the 1958 World Cup and never received a cap for his efforts; who was Man of the Match for Nottingham Forest in the 1959 FA Cup Final, and was rewarded with the standard offer - GBP20 a week, take it or leave it.

Gary Imlach grew up a privileged insider at Goodison Park when Stewart moved into coaching. He knew the highlights of his father's career by heart. But when his dad died he realised they were all he knew. He began to realise, too, that he'd lost the passion for football that his father had passed down to him.

In this book, he faces his growing alienation from the game he was born into, as he revisits key periods in his father's career to build up a picture of his football life - and through him a whole era. "My Father and Other Working-Class Heroes" brilliantly recaptures a lost world and the way it changed, blending the personal and the historical into a unique soccer story.

I recently finished reading this book and felt compelled to recommend it.

This book is about more than just football, it is also the story of a son's quest to get to know his father, through his playing history and the friendships he had forged within the game, after it was too late to do this directly.

Through the memories and the old match reports we build up a picture of a very different football environment from that of today, players on a maximum wage and being treated as disposable assets of the clubs - rather than the world of overpaid, overexposed, primadonnas that form a significant element of the sport nowadays.

The book also contains some amusing episodes including the revelation about Alan Ball's famous white boots contained in the following section:

For a nine-year-old newly arrived on Merseyside in 1969, though, there was more kudos in having a current member of the Everton coaching staff for a father than a cup-winner from before I was born. Formby is a small coastal town on the way north to Southport, still a popular spot for Everton and Liverpool players who don't fancy the posher parts of the Wirral. We'd been parachuted in that summer as marked men. Our footballing heritage was very much a sidebar to the big news that we were Goodison insiders; something our school friends could go home and ask their dads about, if they remembered.

Besides, our father's achievements were all safely in the record books. We took pride in them, but there was nothing we could do to influence the outcome of games already played and trophies long since held aloft on open-top buses. The '69-70 League Championship, though, was up for grabs, and we knew we had to do our bit. The same clothes every week, the scarf on the same way, the standing and shouting of exactly the same phrase of exhortation to the defence every time Everton conceded a corner: who knew what variables might affect the result one way or the other? Best to cover all the bases just to be on the safe side.

This was part of the responsibility that came with what, across the playground, must have looked like tremendous privilege. At school the only other football offspring our age were the children of the Liverpool centre-half Ron Yeats, and they were girls. So, alone among our peers, we had the secret knowledge. We knew what cars they drove, what their training numbers were, what they ate before matches. When Alan Ball signed a contract with a Danish company no one had heard of and became the first English player to wear white boots it was big news - all our mates were talking about it. But we knew something else: that Alan Ball didn't actually like his new boots and rarely wore them; that his highly visible Hummel were, in fact, usually a pair of Adidas 2000 with a fresh coat of Dulux. We'd seen them. Our dad had painted them. We had a pair of his stiff and creaky Hummel rejects hanging up in the garage for any friends who didn't believe us.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from both the historical football aspect and also that of the son's quest to really know his father. The book is very engaging and you find yourself being drawn into both the son's quest and the father's football career that took him from playing on the town square in Lossiemouth to representing his country in the World Cup finals then back down through the lower leagues.

Treat yourself, read it and enjoy.