The Football Book For Everyone

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

When I started the exercise on reading every football book in the Bridgend library area I never expected to be able to recommend one that could appeal to those who loved,hated or was just plain indifferent to the sport. Forever Young by Oliver Kay proved me wrong.

Obviously a knowledge of football helps in it's reading. But the key point in this book is the universal issue, not just in football but in other walks of life as well as life itself where you have an ambition and a talent to reach the pinnacle of that ambition only to have it suddenly and irrevocably taken away.

It's the story of the life of Adrian Doherty. A young man whose talent led him from Northern Ireland to the Manchester United youth team of the early nineties alongside people around that time as Beckham. the Neville brothers and particularly Ryan Giggs (a player who he was often compared more favourably than).Why he didn't reach that level I won't spoil. Let's just say that there's no stain on his character.

If you just read an outline of his life you would have then thought that it was one of tragic decline whilst people who had equal and/or lesser talent achieved superstardom. You would have also thought that Aiden Doherty would've lived the rest of his life racked with bitterness and resentment (I know I would have been). Oliver Kay shows that this wasn't case. Partly due to a quietly resilient personality and also because he had other passions to fall back on when football was no longer an option. And to those non sporting people his post football life takes up about half of the book.

Towards it's end Kay discusses a disturbing issue with regard to why Adrian Doherty left football. Again I won't spoil things by discussing it here, suffice it to say that it deserves an answer.

And how good is the book? If I was just to say I read in a two day period and was gripped perhaps that would be enough. It's a tribute to Oliver Kay's writing and of course the hero that is Aiden Doherty.

I won't be able to go to the library again until Monday so a new non Penguin/Pelican paperback is required. The book from the great unread is:

Helene Hanff - Letter From New York

This is from a series of monthly of broadcasts that the author of 84 Charing Cross Road did for BBC's Woman's Hour in the late eighties. When I finish reading it I think I'd have finished all of her books, certainly those published in Britain.

Until the next time.