Pitch perfect

It is fashionable, in the wake of all those rowers and cyclists and runners, abled and otherwise, who do what they do for something — glory, pride, joy of physical exertion?  — other than for money, to disparage football, and to regard it as somehow vulgar and its practitioners over-indulged.

Despite the fairytale exploits of Chelsea and Manchester City at the end of last season, football is seen as having a lot of catching up to do. It is, after all, almost impossible not to be cynical about a sport that rewards its players so extravagantly. This book reminds us that football too has its virtues.

Duncan Hamilton’s father, James, a lifelong Newcastle supporter, a miner, who died in 1997, did not at all begrudge modern players their huge rewards, but he demanded from the greatest players not only a level of skill far above the average, but a demeanour to match. It was a belief, like many other beliefs and values, that his son inherited.

This marvellous and affecting book, which is about love and fatherhood and history and manners as much as it is about football, records the ways in which the lives and exploits of gifted players and managers intersected, usually symbolically, but often in the flesh, with Hamilton’s father’s life, and his grandfather’s, and his own.

The players include Jackie Milburn, the ‘altruistic Everyman’ who hated fame, but whose nine-foot bronze statue stands in Northumberland Street in Newcastle. Then there is Duncan Edwards, after whom the author was named, who taught himself to type, and wrote a book, Tackle Soccer This Way, in which he demanded that a losing team leave the field ‘with dignity’, and that players should ‘never argue with the referee’.