Liverpool into the 21st century: The Players' Stories

Ring of Fire

With a foreword by Steven Gerrard and interviews with major Liverpool players and managers, Ring of Fire focuses on a tumultuous decade in the club's history - the 2000s.

Simon Hughes is a journalist and author. He covers Merseyside football for the Independent and has written for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. His book Red Machine won the Antonio Ghirelli Prize for Italian Soccer Foreign Book of the Year 2014. His other titles include Secret Diary of a Liverpool Scout, Men in White Suits and Ring of Fire. He lives in Liverpool.

Following the success of Simon Hughes’ Red Machine and Men in White Suits, books which depicted Liverpool FC’s domination during the 1980s and its subsequent fall in the 1990s, Ring of Fire focuses on the 2000s and the primary characters who propelled Liverpool to the forefront of European football once again. With a foreword by Steven Gerrard, this is the third edition in a bestselling series based on revealing interviews with former players, coaches and managers. 
 
For Liverpool FC, entry into the 21st century began with modernisation and trophies under manager Gérard Houllier and development was then underpinned by improbable Champions League glory under Rafael Benítez. Yet that is only half of the story. The decade ended with the club being on the verge of administration after the shambolic reign of American owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. 
 
In Ring of Fire, Hughes’ interviewees – including Jamie Carragher, Xabi Alonso and Michael Owen – take you through Melwood’s training ground gates and into the inner sanctum, the Liverpool dressing room. Each person delivers fascinating insights into the minds of the players, coaches and boardroom members as they talk frankly about exhilarating highs and excruciating lows, from winning cups in Cardiff and Istanbul to the political infighting that undermined a succession of managerial reigns. 
 
Ring of Fire tells the real stories: those never told before by the key players who lived through it all.

Liverpool FC in the 1990s - The Players' Stories

Men in White Suits

The fascinating inside story behind the decline of Liverpool FC in the 1990s, as told by a host of influential characters associated with the team during this tumultuous period in the club’s history.

The best Liverpool author around, investigating one of the most enduring questions in British club football: why Liverpool, imperious for so long, so abruptly and completely stopped winning titles from the 1990s. That is some combination. A captivating book which is essential  reading for all fans of the game, whether Liverpool supporters or not.

Ian Herbert, Chief Sportswriter, The Independent

Simon Hughes is a journalist and author. He writes for the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and The Independent, as well as Liverpool Football Club’s official magazine. 
 Red Machine won the Antonio Ghirelli prize for Italian soccer foreign book of the year in 2014. His other titles include Secret Diary of a Liverpool Scout and The Torres Story. 
 Simon’s latest book, Men in White Suits: Liverpool in the 1990s, the Players’ Stories is the inside story behind the decline of Liverpool FC, as told by a host of influential characters associated with the team during this tumultuous period in the club’s history.

In Men in White Suits, Simon Hughes meets some of the most colourful characters to have played for Liverpool Football Club during the 1990s. 
 
The resulting interviews, set against the historical backdrop of both the club and the city, deliver a rich portrait of life at Anfield during a decade when on-field frustrations were symptomatic of off-the-field mismanagement and ill-discipline. 
 
After the shock resignation of Dalglish and Graeme Souness's ill-fated reign, the Reds – under the stewardship of Roy Evans – displayed a breathtaking style led by a supremely talented young group of British players whose names featured as regularly on the front pages of the tabloids as they did on the back. The Daily Mail was the first newspaper to tag Evans’s team as the Spice Boys. 
 
Yet despite their flaws, this was a rare group of individuals: mavericks, playboys, goal-scorers and luckless defenders. Wearing off-white Armani suits, their confident personalities were exemplified in their pre-match walk around Wembley before the 1996 FA Cup final (a 1-0 defeat to Manchester United). 
 
In stark contrast to the media-coached, on-message interviews given by today’s top stars, the blunt, ribald and sometimes cutting recollections of the footballers featured in Men in White Suits provide a rare insight into this fascinating era in Liverpool’s long and illustrious history.

Liverpool FC in the '80s: The Players' Stories

Red Machine

Opens the door to both the dressing-room and the boot room at Anfield during the 1980s to reveal a wealth of untold stories from the era

an excellent new book ... Eat your heart out, ProZone.

His abilities are delivered with excellent understatement in Simon Hughes' Red Machine.

During the 1980s, Liverpool Football Club dominated English football, winning six league titles, two European Cups, two FA Cups and four League Cups. In Red Machine, Simon Hughes interviews some of the most colourful characters to have played for the club during that period. The resulting interviews, set against the historical backdrop of both the club and the city, provide a vivid portrait of life at Liverpool during an era when the club’s unparalleled on-pitch success often went hand in hand with a boozy social scene fraught with rows, fights and wind-ups. 
 
The players featured here include John Barnes, Bruce Grobbelaar, Howard Gayle, Michael Robinson, John Wark, Kevin Sheedy, Nigel Spackman, Steve Staunton, David Hodgson and Craig Johnston, as well as first-team coach Ronnie Moran. Their candid, ribald and sometimes scathing recollections provide an antidote to the media-coached, on-message interviews given by today’s players and combine to offer a unique insight to this exciting time in the club’s history.

And God Created Cricket

The definitive history of English cricket told in typically irreverent fashion by the William Hill Award-winning author of A Lot of Hard Yakka.

The culture and history of the game are amusingly brought out in an enormously jolly book by one of our best cricket writers, Simon Hughes. Its very title - And God Created Cricket - appropriately echoes the near-religious fervour with which many of us regard, or used to regard, the game. With his usual combination of authority and wit, Mr Hughes guides us through all the great tales of the game, from the earliest days to the present: a story he characterises as our having invented the game, and others having learned swiftly how to beat us at it

An appreciation of the past is more generally found among cricket devotees than those of any other sport, a fact understood perfectly by Simon Hughes in And God Created Cricket. Hughes takes us on a breathless tour through cricket history, the great players, personalities, matches and events. He never slackens pace or dwells on the dry details of the scoreboard; the next entertaining anecdote is always waiting in the next paragraph

A lively romp through cricketing history... Hughes is a spirited and entertaining guide through the vicissitudes of God's own sport... brilliant and hilarious

Do we really need yet another history of cricket? Yes, if it's as perkily written as this. The former Middlesex quickie has strung the story of "the greatest game on earth" (his words, but we agree) together in entertaining, conversational manner, and he is as sound on players past as present and acute on some of today's greats... A fresh trip down a well-trodden path

A characteristically jaunty romp through the history of the game

Excellent... an irreverent, entertaining resume of cricket's long history

Simon Hughes won eight titles with Middlesex, including four county cricket championships, between 1980 and 1991 before finishing his playing career at Durham. He started writing for the Independent while still playing, and has written for the Daily Telegraph and broadcasted for the BBC since his retirement in 1994. He is known to millions of cricket fans as 'The Analyst' for his role in Channel 4's cricket coverage, and is now part of Five's cricket commentary team as well as commentating for BBC radio. He is the author of five previous books including A Lot of Hard Yakka, winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 1997. He lives in Hammersmith with Tanya and their three children Callum, Nancy and Billy.

Cricket defines Englishness like no other national pastime. From its earliest origins in the sixteenth century (or an early version played by shepherds called creag in the 1300s), through the formation of the MCC and the opening of Lord's cricket ground in 1787, to the spread of county cricket in the next century, when the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack was first published and the Ashes series was born, this simple sport of bat and ball has captured the imagination of the masses. 
 
Throughout its 500-year history, cricket has been a mirror for society as a whole, reflecting the changes that have brought us from the quintessential village green to Freddie Flintoff's pedalo, from W G Grace to Monty Panesar, via a fair number of eccentrics, heroes and downright villains. 
 
William Hill Award-winning writer Simon Hughes, no mean player himself, has lived and breathed cricket his whole life and now takes his analytical skills and typically irreverent eye to charting the history of English cricket. But this is no dry, dusty tome. It is the story of the mad characters who inhabit the game, the extraordinary lengths people will go to to watch and play it, the tale of a national obsession. It debunks the myth of cricket sportsmanship, showing the origins of sledging and match-fixing in centuries of subterfuge, corruption and violence. And it takes us beyond sport, to the heart of what it really means to be English.

Simon Hughes

The Inside Story of the Resurgence of Liverpool FC

_________ 
 
'WE ARE LIVERPOOL - THIS MEANS MORE.' JÜRGEN KLOPP 
 
Allez Allez Allez is the inside account of Liverpool FC during the Klopp era, including the 2018/19 campaign which saw the club compete in the most gripping Premier League title race in history and become Champions of Europe for the sixth time. 
 
Featuring access to management, players and staff, Allez Allez Allez explains how Liverpool have emerged from what Jürgen Klopp described as the “depression” of 2015 to achieve feats that have eluded an entire generation of supporters. 
 
Through original research and exclusive interviews, Simon Hughes takes readers into Melwood, the club’s training ground, and behind the dressing room door. He takes them to Chapel Street, where the club’s business is determined, and to America, where it is owned. He takes them into Anfield, where many of the most important moments are defined, and he takes them on to the pitches of the Premier League and the Champions League, as we revisit how Liverpool stormed their way to the top of the Premier League this season.

Simon Hughes

Books by Simon Hughes

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