The Heart of the Game - Jimmy Greaves (Time Warner, 2005)

This amazing book is only £6.99 in paperback and it has Jimmy Greaves going on a fascinating discourse of football - why it is so popular, the history of the game, the different clubs, and the rich heritage of the game.

This book must be bought, something I realised after about 30 minutes of browsing through it in Waterstones, Roman Gate, Exeter.

The new, modernised Waterstone's bookstore is awful and I prefer the old layout. The new Costa coffee cafe at the High Street end of the shop is too noisy and the atmosphere is more of a cafe than a nice, quiet bookshop. The floorspace is obviously much larger, since they've taken away some partitions that previously divided up the place (on the site of the old ABC cinema, demolished in about 1989).

Anyway, the Jimmy Greaves book is a revelation. Is he a great, intelligent writer or has it been ghost-written? I wonder. It opens with an anecdote about the Spurs team the in a hotel in Leicester the night before a match back in the 1960s. The Spurs skipper, Danny Blanchflower, gives a Plato-esque exposition on why the game is so popular. Fascinating.