Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Dave Bassett

Wally Downes

'If we can sell Newcastle Brown to Japan, and if Wimbledon can make it to the First Division, there is surely no achievement beyond our reach.' Margaret Thatcher 
 
The Crazy Gang is the story of a football miracle. Promoted to the Football League in 1977, Wimbledon FC was a small team from south London that against the odds went all the way to the top of the First Division, then to win the FA Cup, in only just over a decade. With no money, scant resources and a blend of youth players and offcuts from other clubs, they were christened 'Rag-Arse Rovers'. They played hard on the pitch and partied hard off it. 
 
Dave 'Harry' Bassett was the manager who drilled a fierce fighting spirit into his players, an unbreakable team ethos, but he was also an underrated master tactician and pioneer of innovative training methods. Wally Downes was the midfield fulcrum of the Dons, but also the ringleader for the various acts of debauchery and general silliness that earned the club their reputation. 
 
In The Crazy Gang, Harry and Wally are joined by a host of former Wimbledon players and staff, both famous names like Vinnie Jones, Lawrie Sanchez and Dave Beasant, but also unsung heroes in the club's history, to tell it as it really was. This is real football, the way fans remember it, and a world away from multimillionaire Premier League primadonnas.

The Crazy Gang

Dave Roberts

When Dave Roberts relocates to the USA, his wife informs him that they can only take what is 'absolutely essential'. Packing his collection of football programmes (1,134 of them - football fans are sticklers for statistics), Dave is aghast to be informed that the programmes do not fall into that category. He must whittle down his treasured archive to only what will fit inside a Tupperware container the size of a Dan Brown hardback. 
 
32 Programmes tells the story of how Dave made the selection of his most important programmes, and how the process brought back a flood of nostalgia for simpler times. As the sights, sounds and smells of those 1,134 football matches return, the choices Dave makes reflect the twists and turns that life takes. Finally, with just hours to go before the flight, the container is full to the brim. One more programme will be added to the collection - one that Dave never thought he would see and which means more to him than any other. 
 
32 Programmes is the story of youthful football obsession, crushes on disinterested girls, rubbish jobs and trying to impress skinheads. But most of all, it is the story of a man's life and loves, of family, friends and football.

32 Programmes

Richard Sanders

"Footeballe is nothinge but beastlie furie and extreme violence", wrote Thomas Elyot in 1531. Nearly five hundred years later, the game may still seem furious and violent, but it has also become the most popular sport on the planet. 
 
This is the story of how the modern, professional, spectator sport of football was born in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. It's a tale of testosterone-filled public schoolboys, eccentric mill-owners and bolshy miners, and of why we play football the way we do. Who invented heading? Why do we have an offside law? And why are foreigners so much better than us at the game we invented? 
 
Based on exhaustive research, Beastly Fury picks apart the complex processes which forged the modern game, turning accepted wisdom on its head. It's a story which is strangely familiar - of grasping players, corrupt clubs and autocratic officials. It's a tale of brutality, but at times too, of surprising artistry. Above all it's a story of how football, uniquely among the sports of that era, became what it is today - the people's game.

Beastly Fury

The Strange Birth Of British Football

Bill McLaren

Just before the start of the 2002 Wales v Scotland match in Cardiff, the stadium announcer asked people to stand and acknowledge Bill McLaren's great contribution to the sport. The whole ground rose, leaving McLaren choking back the tears. Then came a voice in his ear: 'Cue, Bill...' 
 
Coping with his emotions on that day was obviously not straightforward, even for a commentator of Bill McLaren's experience, used to being caught up in some of the most dramatic moments rugby has ever seen. But Bill also talks frankly about the greatest tragedy of his life: the death of his younger daughter from cancer at 46, the three years of agony and the trauma of her final day. Bill wanted to stay at her bedside but she insisted he go and carry out a commentating duty in Edinburgh on the Saturday afternoon. He did so, rushed back to the hospital, but she had died that afternoon while he was on air. 
 
McLaren, himself, had almost died of TB in his youth and he tells of the days and nights when he hid under the sheets in bed at the Scottish hospital where he was kept for 19 months, 'crying myself to sleep each night as they took away my friends who had died that day. I was certain I would be next'. He has excellent memories of his war years and delves deep to recall some harrowing times as a forward observation spotter when he came within inches of being killed by a German sniper. Later, he also remembers leading his men one day into a small northern Italian town where they discovered 1500 corpses piled up in the square. 'That was the day I became a man, rather quickly,' he says. He was 21. 
 
As well reliving the highlights of his illustrious career as a commentator, Bill talks of the game today and his regrets that rugby went professional. He is a fierce critic of what this has led to and fears for the future health and safety of rugby players because he regards the modern game as dangerously physical. His story amounts to a history of the game itself and reaffirms McLaren's status as something of a global treasure.

My Autobiography

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