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9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

Liverpool FC and the Changing Face of English Football

Into the Red

John Williams has written widely on football and football culture. Previous publications include Hooligans Abroad, The Roots of Football Hooliganism, Game Without Frontiers and Is It All Over: Can Football Survive The Premier League? He also regularly contributes to football magazine When Saturday Comes. He is the director of the Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research and is a lecturer at the University of Leicester.

After a decade in football wilderness, weighed down by the legacy of unmatched domestic and European successes in the 1970s and ’80s, Liverpool Football Club – under new French coach Gérard Houllier and forward-looking chief executive, Rick Parry – face up to the huge challenge of building a new team and a successful modern club at Anfield fit for the twenty-first century. 
 
But change is never easy and a rough ride lies ahead. Hard-headed and controversial, Houllier and his policies are proving contentious: changing the dressing-room culture which has been central to the club’s earlier successes and his policy of player rotation, to name just two. So how does this new coaching guru, with a strong personal attachment to both the city and the club, see the future of the game and Liverpool’s place in it? And do the fans of the club – its lifeblood – share Houllier’s vision of a borderless international football squad and a more pragmatic, less flamboyant approach to playing the modern game? 
 
Into the Red charts the place of football in the city of Liverpool, along with some of the reasons for the club’s dramatic fall from grace. It also reports on the extraordinary ‘revival’ season for Liverpool FC in 2000–01 as the club battled, uniquely, in Europe and at home for honours across four different fronts, and on season 2001–02, a dramatic one for Houllier in particular. It includes comment from some of the key protagonists at Anfield as Liverpool FC begins to build, on and off the pitch, an exciting new footballing era for the club, dragging it into the new millennium and ultimately challenging the great football epochs of the team’s history under legends such as Shankly, Paisley and Fagan.

John Williams

'With the help of other players and backroom staff he examines the club in the Paisley glory years'.

Kennedy's Way

Many years have now passed since the greatest period of European dominance by any English football club came to an end. Between 1977 and 1984, Liverpool won the European Cup an unprecedented four times and established themselves as the number-one team in Europe. It was during the successful European Cup campaigns of 1981 and 1984 that the unlikely figure of Alan Kennedy came to dominate the headlines. 
 
Folk-hero left-back Alan Kennedy - nicknamed 'Barney Rubble' by fans after The Flintstones character due to his straightforward, no-frills approach to the game - scored the winning goal in the 1981 European Cup final against Real Madrid, as well as the nerve-twanging winning shoot-out penalty against AS Roma in 1984, a feat which secured his position in European football history. 
 
Kennedy's Way examines Kennedy's footballing career under manager Bob Paisley (and, later, under Joe Fagan) and provides a retrospective account of Liverpool's dominance during those years. Drawing on Kennedy's memories of the period, as well as those of other players and backroom staff involved with the Reds at that time, it is an irreverent, revealing account of the dressing-room culture at the club while it was at the height of its powers. 
 
The book concludes with reflections on Kennedy's post-playing life and on the trajectory of Liverpool since the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies, in 1985 and 1989 respectively, right up to recent events at the club, including the exit of Gérard Houllier and the team's dramatic return to the pinnacle of European club football under new manager Rafael Benítez.

John Williams

Praise for Inside Bob Paisley's Liverpool

'With the help of other players and backroom staff he examines the club in the Paisley glory years'.

Books by John Williams

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9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

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