Hype and Glory: The Decline and Fall of the England Football team, from Revie to McClaren

Description

England has singularly failed to make any impact at either the World Cup or the European Championships for over forty years. Gavin Newsham tells us why. There have been twenty major international football tournaments since that Saturday in July 1966 when Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup trophy for England. As each of these competitions has come around, a wave of expectation has been followed, with seeming inevitability, by disappointment just weeks later. But with just three semi-final appearances to show for over forty years of effort and pain, why does England - as a team and as a nation - continue to believe that it has an almost divine right to succeed in international football? Hype and Glory shows just why the England football team has struggled to live with the weight of expectation. Full of dramatic on-field action and dressing room gossip, it vividly recreates the highs and lows, the agony and ecstacy, the close calls and the humiliations, and through scores of interviews with players, managers and journalists, pinpoints precisely why things have always gone so badly wrong .

Gavin Newsham was awarded the National Sporting Club's Best New Writer award in 2004 for his first book, Letting The Big Dog Eat. He has written on sport for a wide variety of publications, including the Guardian, Sunday Times, the OSM and Golf Punk magazine. Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos was published by Atlantic Books in 2006.

"'A riotous morality tale, stuffed with decadence and a little violence, it illustrates the folly of importing foreign culture wholesale... Solid research, good storytelling and plenty of colourful anecdotes.' Lawrence Phelan, Independent on Sunday 'Football books live and die by their subject matter, and fortunately the tale told here - of the ambitious but ill-fated mission to sell soccer to the Americans - is a corker... This book is a gripping evocation of a glorious but brief moment when the beautiful game had the US entranced.' Time Out"