250 Days. Daniel Storey. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Daniel Storey
Издательство: HarperCollins
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008320508
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       COPYRIGHT

      HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      FIRST EDITION

      © Daniel Storey 2019

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Cover photographs © Action Images/Reuters

      A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

      Daniel Storey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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       www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

      Source ISBN: 9780008320492

      Ebook Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008320508

      Version: 2018-12-10

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       PRELUDE

       ‘Are you big enough for me?’

       DAY 1

       ‘Go on, Cantona, have an early shower’

       ‘Good on you Eric’

       DAY 6

       ‘When someone is doing well we have to knock them down’

       DAY 66

       ‘When seagulls follow the trawler’

       DAY 109

       ‘Only a fool would say it didn’t cost us the league’

       DAY 157

       ‘You have not let yourself be affected by all this bloody nonsense’

       DAY 196

       ‘Obviously we don’t want to lose him’

       DAY 207

       ‘You can’t win anything with kids’

       DAY 250

       ‘A Mancunian version of Bastille Day’

       POSTSCRIPT

       ‘He opened my eyes to the indispensability of practice’

       BIBLIOGRAPHY

       About the Publisher

       PRELUDE

      ‘Are you big enough for me?’

      Eric Cantona was not the first foreign footballer in England, but he might well have been the most influential. No single player better represents English football’s rapid transformation from the working-class, kick-and-rush game of Division One – a sport that had largely remained the same for half a century – to the glamour and exoticism of the current Premier League.

      Before the mid-1990s foreign players were a luxury item, mysterious circus animals tasked with performing for our entertainment. At that time, ‘foreign’ had a pejorative connotation: fancy, flash, weak-willed. Foreign imports could temporarily call England home, but it would never be their natural habitat. They would hate our weather, hate our food, hate the physicality of the game that we invented and then gave to the world. And they would soon leave for whence they had come.

      That was odd, given the success of some memorable foreign imports in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa at Tottenham, Arnold Mühren and Frans Thijssen at Ipswich, Johnny Metgod at Nottingham Forest; all became fan favourites due to their natural talent and willingness to embrace the culture of their clubs. But their success did not provoke an immediate wave of immigration.

      The first weekend of the inaugural Premier League in August 1992 demonstrated English football’s insular nature. The 22 clubs handed appearances to only 13 non-British players. Four of those were goalkeepers and another four (John Jensen, Michel Vonk, Gunnar Halle and Roland Nilsson) were defensively minded players.

      A high percentage of foreign players in the Premier League’s early years were from northern European countries – Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands. They were preferred not only on account of their assumed comfort in dealing with the British climate, but also because they came from countries where English football was already a staple.