A Game of Three Halves

Book excerpt: The word ‘unique’ is often wrongly used but, in the case of A Game of THREE Halves, the author’s story is indisputably one of a kind. No other writer has worked on the inside for both Aston Villa and Birmingham City while keeping an eye on local and national footballing affairs for more than seventy years. During that period he met, and sometimes worked with, many of the best-known personalities in world football: from Pele to Cruyyff, Busby to Ferguson, Matthews to Cullis, Wright to Banks, Hill to Coleman, Saunders to Atkinson, Best to Francis, and many more. From war-time football to the present day, across eight decades, football has changed so much that not even the ball, apart from still being spherical, is the same as before. The fight to remove the maximum wage, the initially steady and ultimately explosive growth in pay, the arrival and development of European football, the curse of the hooligan, the introduction of the Premier League. A flavour of these developments can be found in these pages. This is not an anorak’s football history, but a lively collection of real-life anecdotal memories laced with controversial personal comment. The object of the exercise is simply to be a ‘good read’ while hopefully introducing a touch of football and social history. Here can be found such unlikely characters as an armed robber, an exorcist, some terrified sky divers, half a moustache that ‘went missing’, a factual hungover ‘Biggles’ and a shoot-to-kill former iron curtain guard. This is a look at football like no other.