Applauding The Kop

Author: Paul Wilkes
Publisher: eBook Partnership
ISBN: 178531808X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
Applauding the Kop is the definitive story of Liverpool FC's goalkeepers. Through a series of remarkable interviews, it reveals the pressure and demands of playing in the prime position for one of the most successful sides in world football. The book offers honest observer accounts of the greatest goalkeepers to ever pull on the number-one jersey at Anfield, and first-hand anecdotes from those who trained at the club. Get an insider's view on the likes of Bruce Grobbelaar, Jerzy Dudek and David James. The players share funny, emotional and alternative viewpoints of their more illustrious team-mates at Liverpool and elsewhere, offering a rare glimpse of life in the most extraordinary leagues and teams in Europe. Applauding the Kop provides a unique insight into the personalities of many goalkeeping greats, and tells the tales of others who were less successful, detailing the events that dictate how they are perceived. Each player had a very different journey in their quest to reach the pinnacle of the game

The Kop: Liverpool's Twelfth Man

Author: Stephen F Kelly
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0753547627
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
'When The Kop is roaring it really is like having a twelfth man out there on the pitch. They're the best fans in the country - by miles.' Jamie Carragher The Spion Kop is one of the most famous, emotive and atmospheric vantage points in all of sport. The one-time terracing that could 'suck the ball into the net' - in Bill Shankly's immortal phrase - still inspires and intimidates today. Once the home of more than 25,000 swaying, singing, standing Kopites, it's now seated and can hold merely half that number, but its magic still remains. In this fully revised and updated edition, Stephen F Kelly uses eyewitness testimonies from Kopites, policemen, cleaners and referees as well as newspaper reports and the recollections of players and managers to trace the history of this amazing and fascinating stand - each anecdote wonderfully evoking the spirit of the changing times the Kop has experienced. Stirring, emotional and marvellously readable, The Kop is a must for any Liverpool fan and anyone interested in what it means to be a supporter of any football club.

KOP

Author: Warren Hammond
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429942134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Juno is a dirty cop with a difficult past and an uncertain future. When his family and thousands of others emigrated to the colony world of Lagarto, they were promised a bright future on a planet with a booming economy. But before the colonists arrived, everything changed. An opportunistic Earth-based company developed a way to produce a cheaper version of Lagarto's main export, thus effectively paupering the planet and all its inhabitants. Growing up on post-boom Lagarto, Juno is but one of the many who live in despair. Once he was a young cop in the police department of the capital city of Koba. That was before he started taking bribes from Koba's powerful organized crime syndicate. Yet despite his past sins, some small part of him has not given up hope. So he risks his life, his marriage and his job to expose a cabal that would enslave the planet for its own profit. But he's got more pressing problems, when he's confronted with a dead man, a short-list of leads, and the obligatory question: who done it? Set up for a fall, partnered with a beautiful young woman whose main job is to betray him, and caught in a squeeze between the police chief and the crooked mayor, Juno is a compelling, sympathetic hero on a world that has no heroes. An exciting science fiction adventure and a dark, gritty noir thriller told in taut, powerful prose, this is a remarkable debut novel.

Passing Rhythms

Author: Stephen Hopkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1845209672
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
Liverpool Football Club, in stark contrast to its competitors, remains locally owned, not a conglomerate or media business. Unlike its main rivals, the Liverpool club has been loathe to pursue global markets for merchandizing - though it attracts a huge fandom around the world - and its ambitions remain resolutely fixed on footballing success. No football club has ever had such an extended period of dominance inthe English game, nor extended that dominance to Europe so effectively.Many of the current crop of top young players are locally born and are a central feature of the city's nightlife, as well as national icons in pop/football/youth culture. But there are fears that the Club's great days have now passed. At the height of its powers in the 1980s, Liverpool FC was the site of two catastrophic crowd disasters, which effectively transformed the sport and added to wounding perceptions about the city's alleged sentimentality, fatalism and irreversible decline. The legacy of the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies continues to shape the self-image of the Club and those who support it. A seething rivalry with nearby corporate giant Manchester United is a constant reminder of football's new order.Addressing all of these concerns, as well as Liverpool's global reputation as the home of the Beatles and the 'Mersey sound', this book takes an original approach to the study of football by examining its links with other important popular culture forms, especially pop music, but also television and youth styles. In particular, however, it looks at the very special meaning of football in Liverpool.

Red or Dead

Author: David Peace
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612193692
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 738

Book Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice "[T]he stuff of great literature." —The New York Times | "Red or Dead is a winner." —The Washington Post The place where the swinging sixties started – Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles – wasn’t so swinging. Amid industrial blight and a bad economy, the port town’s shipping industry was going bust and there was widespread unemployment, with no assistance from a government tightening its belt. Even the Beatles moved to London. Into these hard times walked Bill Shankly, a former Scottish coal miner who took over the city’s perpetually last-place soccer team. He had a straightforward work ethic and a favorite song – a silly pop song done by a local band, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Soon he would have entire stadiums singing along, tens of thousands of people all dressed in the team color red . . . as Liverpool began to win . . . And soon, too, there was something else those thousands of people would chant as one: Shank-lee, Shank-lee . . . In Red or Dead, the acclaimed writer David Peace tells the stirring story of the real-life working-class hero who lifted the spirits of an entire city in turbulent times. But Red or Dead is more than a fictional biography of a real man, and more than a thrilling novel about sports. It is an epic novel that transcends those categories, until there’s nothing left to call it but – as many of the world’s leading newspapers already have – a masterpiece.

Mr Shankly’s Photograph

Author: Stephen Kelly
Publisher: Portico
ISBN: 1911042998
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
A holiday photograph of a 10 year old lad leaning over the garden fence with the Huddersfield Town manager Bill Shankly is the starting point for an enduring bond. Shankly, the Kop and the Cavern. Was there ever a more thrilling place for any young person than Liverpool in the sixties? Yet is the pull of the city with all its attractions overwhelming enough to defy the boy's own burgeoning ambitions that seem destined to whisk him away from the team that he loves so much? This is not just a tale about football, it's about life in Liverpool: Anfield, the Beatles, Cup finals, Catholicism, girls, the shipyards and the politics. It's the story of one young lad's journey into adulthood, inspired by a man who was to become an icon. You never know how good it is until it's gone. That was Liverpool in the sixties.

44 Years With The Same Bird

Author: Brian Reade
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330540424
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
There have been football books which have told their tale through the partisan heart of a besotted fan, and those that have dissected their subject through the scientific mind of an objective writer. But rarely does one fuse the blind passion of a lifelong supporter with the cold eye of an award-winning journalist in the way 44 Years With The Same Bird does. That bird is the Liver Bird, and on the surface this book is a pitch-side view of the entire modern era of Britain's most successful football club. It is Brian Reade's take on the extraordinary stories behind the 48 trophies he has seen Liverpool lift since watching them en route to their first ever FA Cup win in 1965, right through to the Champions League defeat in Athens in 2007. It takes in all of the big nights that propelled the club to five European Cups, three UEFA Cups, twelve titles, countless domestic cup triumphs, bitter failures, the tragic disasters in Sheffield and Brussels, as well as the barren years of the late 60s and the 90s. But the book goes far deeper than that. It's about how football allowed a father who was separated from his son to forge a precious bond. How a football club can make a city that is dying on its knees keep believing in itself. How you should never, as a professional, get too close to your heroes. How being part of a disaster at a football match (Hillsborough) can leave you a mental wreck, unwilling to carry on, but how witnessing a miracle on a football pitch (Istanbul) makes you realize that no matter how low you sink, you should never give in.

Faith of our Fathers

Author: Alan Edge
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1780574126
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
Alan Edge is a lifelong Liverpool supporter who grew up in an environment where team loyalties were embedded in working-class culture. He was shocked to discover that his young son not only had not intention of following in his father's footsteps as a Liverpool fan, but preferred a Newcastle shirt because it was more fashionable! Faith of our Fathers is more than a personal story; it is a universal tale written with a strong sense of pathos and a rare capacity to bring to life the concerns of fans who feel the game they grew up with is being eroded by commercial exploitation.

If You're Proud To Be A Leeds Fan

Author: Tom Palmer
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1780577990
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
When the Gelderd End sings 'If you're proud to be a Leeds fan clap your hands' you clap your hands . . . but should you? Leeds United Football Club have one of the worst reputations in the country. For years the fans and players - fairly or unfairly - have been associated with thuggery. In If You're Proud to be a Leeds Fan Tom Palmer tries to work out just why he claps and why, when he has to miss a home game for work, he feels so bad. Set in the 2001-02 Premiership season, the author follows Leeds United at stadiums home and away, in bars watching satellite, listening to Radio Leeds and Radio Five Live and watching the pages of Ceefax. He focuses as much on the fans as on the action on the pitch and tries to establish whether Leeds fans and players are really so bad. The book examines the highs and lows of the club's recent history and their impact on the supporters - from the Paris riot in 1975 to relegation in 1982 and the glory of the 1992 League win. Palmer discusses the Bowyer-Woodgate trial, the board's plans to take Leeds United away from Elland Road, the controversial replacement of manager David O'Leary with Terry Venables, and the club's persistent hooliganism problems, especially the fans' unceasing hatred of Manchester United. If You're Proud to be a Leeds Fan tries to explain why, in the face of so many reasons why you shouldn't, you still find yourself clapping. The book includes Leeds poet Tony Harrison's poem 'v.'.

Hillsborough - The Truth

Author: Phil Scraton
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1780578415
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 511

Book Description
This is the definitive, unique account of the disaster in which 96 men, women and children were killed, hundreds injured and thousands traumatised. It details the appalling treatment endured by the bereaved and survivors in the immediate aftermath, the inhumanity of the identification process and the vilification of fans in the national and international media. In 2012, Phil Scraton was primary author of the ground-breaking report published by the Hillsborough Independent Panel following its new research into thousands of documents disclosed by all agencies involved. Against a backdrop of almost three decades of persistent struggle by bereaved families and survivors, in this new edition he reflects on the Panel’s in-depth work, its revelatory findings and their unprecedented impact – an unreserved apology from the Prime Minister; new criminal investigations; the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s largest-ever inquiry; the quashing of 96 inquest verdicts; a review of all health and pathology policies. Paving the way for truth recovery and institutional accountability in other controversial cases, he details the process and considers the impact of the longest ever inquests, from the preliminary hearings to their comprehensive, devastating verdicts. Powerful, disturbing and harrowing, Hillsborough: The Truth exposes the institutional complacency that led to the unlawful killing of the 96, revealing how the interests of ordinary people are marginalised when those in authority sacrifice truth and accountability to protect their reputations.