Liverpool

by Ivan Ponting

Published 24 September 1990
This sumptuous, lovingly crafted volume offers a comprehensive cavalcade of every footballer to have played for Liverpool. Marching shoulder to shoulder through these pages are heroes such as Steven Gerrard, Kenny Dalglish, Ian St John, Jamie Carragher, Emlyn Hughes and Billy Liddell. It has been assembled with warmth and insight, features photographs of every post-war player and is a book to be cherished by all Reds fans.

Since the blessed day when Bill Nicholson took over the managerial reins at White Hart Lane in October 1958, a dazzling cavalcade of fabulous footballers have stepped out proudly with the famous cockerel emblazoned on their chests, and they are all profiled here. A decade has passed since the second edition of "Tottenham Hotspur Player By Player", which is now expanded in two directions.Naturally the latest generation of heroes, popular performers such as Robbie Keane, Ledley King, Aaron Lennon and Dimitar Berbatov, are featured in depth, while all the previous favourites - Blanchflower, Mackay, Greaves, Jennings, Perryman, Hoddle, Ardiles, Gascoigne, Lineker, Ginola, Klinsmann and the rest - are included once more, many of them comprehensively revised and updated. But this time the book offers a massive extra dimension, not only introducing full word-portraits of Arthur Rowe's wondrous push-and-run maestros of the early 1950s and other stalwarts of the immediate postwar years, but also an entry on every man who ever kicked a ball for the Spurs in senior competition.Between these covers, the experienced writer Ivan Ponting - helped by talented young Press Association journalist and Spurs supporter Tom Morgan, whose views on the 21st-century Lilywhites are both fresh and trenchant - has lovingly crafted some 300 comprehensive player profiles, not only of the household names, but also of those individuals whose star ascended only briefly.
Even if they played in only one senior game - remember Len Worley, Robert Brace or Jamie Clapham in the white shirt - they take their deserved place in this collection. Here is not just another book on the glorious north London institution which produced the first League and FA Cup double-winners of the 20th century and so much else. "Tottenham Hotspur Player By Player" has been fashioned with warmth and colour, insight and a feeling for tradition. Lavishly illustrated with around 350 photographs, it will delight countless thousands of supporters in England and all around the planet.

Arsenal

by Ivan Ponting

Published 15 August 1996