SOCCER ROUND THE WORLD

TITLE          Soccer Round The World
AUTHOR         Francis Lee
PUBLISHER      Readers Union Limited
ADDRESS        PO Box 6,
               Newton Abbott,
               Devon, TQ12 2DW
               UK.
ISBN NUMBER    None
PRICE          £1.25

This book is a book club edition of 1972; the original was published by Arthur Barker Limited in 1970. I picked up this copy in Spring 1996 with a book search at my local bookshop for the huge sum of £3.50! The book itself has 119 pages with 28 black & white photos. The dust jacket is a grotty brown with a superimposed image of Lee being tackled by West Germany's Overath in the '70 World Cup; the corresponding photo on the inside is excellent but the cover is totally bland; maybe it was fashionable in the early 70's?

The book kicks off with two chapters on Mexico which is understandable, as at the time of publication the nation was probably still preoccupied by the events of that Summer and in particular the amazing way in which victory was turned into defeat. Lee describes many of the events which led up to that game including the Moore incident where a theft charge was manufactured in Bogota. The frame-up was amateurish, picking on the two England players who were most above reproach: Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton. The hatred he experienced in Mexico is almost tangible, he describes crude attempts to keep the team awake but I do wonder, with the passage of time, whether he would today raise the possibility that Banks had been deliberately poisoned before the West Germany game. Whatever, it's clear that losing this game left it's mark on him, not only from the manner of the defeat but because he fervently believed that the team was not only the best at the World Cup but was better than the England team of '66; I personally wouldn't dispute the latter.

Lee goes on to describe how he was playing cricket four years previously for Heaton in the Bolton League; they elected to bat first so that they'd have the best chance of watching the Wembley final on TV in the bar! He relates his impressions of those footballers and how he never imagined that he would later join them. We already get a glimpse of his reknowned business acumen as he starts out doing a window cleaning round and then onto various other ventures. A nice anecdote concerns him asking the Bolton Wanderers manager Bill Ridding for an extra five pounds to bring his wage up to £25, the level of the senior players (he was top scorer at the time). Riddings refused and replied "What else can you do? You're only a labourer!"

Here the chronology gets a little muddled as the next chapter describes City's hot/cold 1970 season. There are plenty of anecdotes in here including a lot about Doyle's schemes for winding United up e.g. car stickers. Lee admits that the famous indirect free kick goal (League Cup) wasn't a deliberate attempt to trick Stepney, he just didn't see that the referee had his arm up.

Back to Bolton again for a fairly acrimonious description of Bolton Wanderers FC. The entire club comes in for severe criticism, not only for the way they handled Lee, but also for the rank amateurism and small mindedness which reigned at the club. Lee relates how he was so disgruntled after giving 8 years of his footballing life to the club that he finally demanded a transfer after several abortive attempts had been made to sign him. He marched into Ridding's office and demanded his cards, but was told he couldn't have them; off he went to the Employment Exchange where he found out he was in the right, so he came right back to Burnden Park where he eventually got his cards and ceased to be a player of Bolton Wanderers. He had already refused to play in a game and was ready to quit football at this stage. I wonder what he thinks of it all now? After he turned down a move to Wolves because of his business interests (they wouldn't allow him to travel) in came City and secured him for £65,000. Lee was very impressed by the set-up at Maine Road and by the way training was conducted extremely professionally. He praises various players from his Bolton days and in particular, a player who was later to come to Maine Road, Freddie Hill.

He calls Allison God, though they didn't get off to a good start, Allison's first, less-than-humble words to him were "I could make you into a good player"! He goes on to describe him as "The best coach in the world." There is a whole chapter devoted to Europe and in addition to the football he gives a good insight into the cameraderie of the team and how they constantly played jokes on each other despite travel arrangements which frequently went disastrously wrong. This of course culminates in Vienna with the win over Gornik.

The last few chapters are almost conversational; he discusses various penalty-taking stories, later to become even more topical, as well as the League Cup campaign where he was booked after a bit of a collision with one Alan Ball! The final chapter looks at poison pen letters and the life of a modern-day footballer; apparently Doyle used to get tons of hate mail from United fans, the more the merrier as far as he was concerned.

This book is basically a 'snapshot in time' and was written almost as the events happened, but with some personal history thrown in. It gives a great feel of what it was like to be in the England camp in the World Cup and what it was like to be a part of the City team in their most successful year. More than this though, it gives us a feel for Lee; Lee the footballer, Lee the businessman. Even early on you can see just how strong his self-belief is and just how determined a player and a person he is. Lee's commercial success almost has an air of inevitabilty about it looking at this book, and we can only hope that those same qualities which took him to footballing and finanicial success will once again take City to the top.