Sports Books Blog

The football world is indeed in a ferment these days. WAGS are being declared bad role models, Scotland wants to let children in free to grounds and Manchester City can’t buy anyone except trouble makers and Dutch footballers everyone thinks they’ve heard of but aren’t quite sure.

SportsBooks hasn’t got much experience with WAGS (Wives and Girlfriends for those who don’t follow our obsession with celebrity culture. They were invited by the then England manager, dear old Sven, to the World Cup and they made more headlines than the players!) but we do know one. She might not enjoy being called a WAG but Margaret Potts was indeed a celebrity wife in the days when no one had heard of them!

She married Harry Potts, the David Beckham of Burnley at the time, in 1947 and became a model (kitchen equipment as it happens as well as clothes. And she designed the kitchen herself for the women’s pages of the Burnley Express). There was some resentment among the hierarchy of the club especially when Harry became manager and Margaret dared enter the boardroom in a trouser suit. We know her because we published her book ‘Harry Potts – Margaret’s Story’. She’s well into her eighties now, as bright as button and great company. 

For anyone who thinks that WAGS are a modern phenomena, think again. Have a look at this photo from Margaret’s story. It’s the WAGS of the Burnley players in London before the 1962 FA Cup final, Margaret is taking the photo. 

I’m not sure about letting children free into grounds. I have been at sporting events when whole batches of schoolchildren have been allowed in for nothing and the result was a cacophony of high pitched screaming, often at the wrong moments.

Far better that they should revert to the practice of opening the gates at two-thirds time so little ones can sneak in and watch the last half-hour. That’s how I saw my first football and if if was good enough for me…

The other thing you can’t do now is move around the ground. I used to like to watch matches from high up behind the corner flag. If Plymouth Argyle lost I would switch to behind the other corner flag at the same end. If they lost again I’d go down the other end. Sometimes I’d end up watching from the halfway line. We would have been in a bad run if that happened.

My brother-in-law Kevin came to stay recently and told me what I thought was a good Manchester City joke; admittedly he is a United fan. 

Q. What do you get if you simmer a Manchester City fan with some onions and vegetables for a couple of hours?

A. A laughing stock.

I’ve always had a soft spot for City. When I worked in Manchester they were much better to deal with than United and the great team of Bell, Summerbee and Lee was still a recent memory. But, dear me, they do things differently.

What another club would have money to burn and end up with Craig Bellamy and Nigel de Jong? Apparently they were after Kaka, Buffon, Villa (David not Aston), Maradona, Pele and Billy Wright. But none of them were interested.

Happy New Year to all my readers although with the infrequency with which this blog hits the airwaves I don’t suppose there are any any more.

SportsBooks had a fairly successful 2008 although with the BBC filling their 24 hour news channel with doom and gloom all the time I don’t suppose 2009 will as good. I just wish Gordon Brown would make the pips squeak at the banks like the banks made our pips squeak. But basically they are all mates together aren’t they? I long ago got over the idea that there might be a government that represented the people rather than the interests. What gets my goat is that when they say supporting vested interests is in our interests.

I wish Gordon Brown would have the vision that Barack Obama seems to have and roll out a programme of public works instead of shoring up the City of London and giving knighthoods to people in the Treasury who failed to spot what was happening.

We could, for instance, upgrade the broadband system so that we can all have super fast speeds. BT aren’t going to replace all the copper cables with fibre optic – they can’t afford it – but the government could. Then they could get traffic off ridiculously crowded roads by reinstating a lot of the rail network that Beeching slashed. 

You can tell it’s been a slack few days! I’ve even had time to read a book. Normally all I read are submissions by potential authors but over Christmas I watched the second half of the film ‘Seabiscuit’ and my wife bought me the book on which it was based. ‘Seabiscuit’ the book is much better than the film. Written by Laura Hillenbrand, it won the William Hill Sportsbooks of the Year in 2001.

But, as you might suspect, I couldn’t get away from being a publisher/editor all of the time and the paperback version I read posed an interesting question. Fourth Estate, the publishers, bought the book from the US and occasionally US spelling and words crept in. ‘Neighbor’ for instance and Hillenbrand used ‘recused’ where we over here might use ‘excuse’.

Should Fourth Estate have changed this sort of thing? I think so. We are in the process of buying a book from the US by a writer from Northern Ireland and we’ll go through it for that sort of thing. Similarly, we bought the European rights to ’The Ashes – an illustrated history’ by Ken Piesse which was first published by Penguin-Australia. Not much to change because Australian is very like English (!) but Ken used the word ‘robable’ which is an Australian term meaning ‘angry’. So we changed it. Would it have sneaked into ‘Seabiscuit’?