Physio’s the latest to reveal secrets of the football world

IT STARTED as an anonymous column in ‘The Sunday Times’, and it has spawned a total of seven books at this stage, with the latest hitting the shelves at the end of May. I’m referring to ‘The Secret Footballer’, and now this man of mystery has branched out and got one of his friends on board to provide us with further insight into what really goes on behind the scenes at a top professional football club.

To the uninitiated, the general premise is that an ex-player in England of fairly recent vintage started to write about the game, and it was quite clear from his musings that he was undoubtedly an insider.

However, given that he was spilling the beans and exposing incidents of an embarrassing nature more often than not, the writer has operated from day one under the veil of anonymity.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped football fans from trying to figure out his identity, and the general consensus is that it’s Dave Kitson who once played with Stoke City.

That cannot be stated with any degree of certainty though, and I’ve yet to see any internet speculation on who his new sidekick might be.

Book seven is titled ‘The Secret

Footballer - What The Physio

Saw’, and it’s written by a member of one of the Premier League’s top medical teams although his name isn’t revealed.

I’m sure several readers will narrow it down quite easily, because at one point he talks about his team losing a Champions

League semi-final after taking a

1-0 lead into the second leg.

This is the first in the ‘Secret

Footballer’ series I have read, and to be honest I’m not a big fan of people writing about others but lacking the courage to put their name to their thoughts.

It’s easy to be the ‘big man’ on internet message boards when hiding behind a pseudonym, and I have similar feelings about a project of this nature.

As for the actual ‘Secret Footballer’, he doesn’t remain in the background as the physio takes us through a typical season stretching from July to the following May.

Instead, he offers his tuppence worth at the end of each chapter, and comes across as an individual who thinks he’s a lot funnier than he actually is.

As for the physio, he regales the reader with various tales that betray the sanctity of the dressing-room, not to mention the feelings of the individuals involved in many cases.

He gets away with it, though, by not specifically naming names when it comes to some of the juicier stories.

If gossip is your thing, and you don’t particularly care where the subject matter originated from, then you’ll lap up this book.

If, on the other hand, you maintain a healthy scepticism for anonymous works, then this one is better left on the shelf. Without attribution, it left me wondering what was fact as opposed to fiction.

What I did find interesting and revealing was the physio’s explanation of how nothing is left to chance in treating injuries in the Premier League.

For example, as well as the on-pitch physio, there’s a colleague watching on a monitor who uses the benefit of action replay to enlighten the man with the bag when he’s on the field.

As for the tall tales, my advice is to take some, if not all, of them with a grain of salt if you’re tempted by this book.

ALAN AHERNE

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