BOOK REVIEW

The ‘Got Not Got’ Football Gift Book: Every Fan’s Catalogue of Desires by Derek Hammond & Gary Silke (Sportsbookofthemonth.com price £16)

Though it’s only late October, retailers have been in Christmas sales mode for a couple of months, adorning their shops with relatively low-key decorations (for now) and suggesting gifts likely to please any family member.

If you’re a football fan of a certain vintage (or you know someone who is), there’s plenty of excellent sports-related reading material likely to keep you occupied during the forthcoming Christmas holidays. One such tome landed on your reviewer’s desk this week, the latest in a fine series of books fully laden with lashings of nostalgia.

Those of us who began attending our first matches in the 1960s and 70s will undoubtedly recall a much different game to the one which nowadays is never off our television (and other) screens. Fortunately, Derek Hammond and Gary Silke have compiled and written Got Not Got Football Gift Book, sub-titled ‘Every fan’s catalogue of desires’ for those of us who remember how things used to be back in the day.

It is an absolute joy if you vividly recall the wonder of Subbuteo, the Football League Review (stapled to the inside of your programme) or those orange Vernons Pools Mobile Information Units occasionally spotted outside the ground. On top of this, there’s magazine covers from Goal and Shoot as well as players from most clubs, usually posing in some form of early advertisement or promotion, for which they probably received no more than a fiver and a pat on the back.

Halcyon days. A time when Ty-Phoo would send 10x 8” photos of your favourite team in return for ‘any 12’ footballs on the side of a packet of tea and when your Subbuteo floodlights were guaranteed to fail during an important Cup final without any sinister input from those notorious ‘Far Eastern betting rings’. The light bulbs were rubbish, that’s all.

Football’s radical upheaval over the past quarter century has turned a sport into a business. Regrettably, anything that happened pre-Sky, ie. before 1992, has, in the best Stalinist manner, been virtually eradicated. It’s incumbent upon those of us old enough to appreciate how football used to be to keep the flame of yesteryear alive. Buy it and show today’s generation of fans what they’re missing.

We’ve teamed up with www. sportsbookofthemonth.com and have a copy of The Got Not Got Football Gift Book to give away.

To win, visit www.sportsbookofthemonth.com and answer the following question: For which team did Roy of the Rovers play?