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Football histories that are worth their weight

ANTON RIPPON is impressed by the detail and production values of two new reference works on Tottenham and Scottish football history

PA sports writer Tom Morgan, who began his journalistic career with the Western Daily Press, has teamed up with freelance Ivan Ponting – he writes football obituaries for The Independent – to produce a book that will delight all Spurs fans.

Tottenham Hotspur Player By Player contains 300 lovingly written essays on all the great names in the club’s history, complemented by short statistical entries – seasons played, games and goals – for every other player who has pulled on the lily white shirt in more than a century of football.

Normally, I like my reference books to be small and neat – and that is the last description you’d give this large format 304-page work – but Know The Score Books like big production values and it is right in sticking to them here, not least because of the great number of mouth-watering photographs.

And although the authors probably didn’t set out to achieve it, they have managed to write a useful history of the club as well as tell the story of its players.

Know The Score has turned to a retired local government officer and a retired teacher to produce another lovely book with David Potter’s and Phil H Jones’s The Encyclopaedia Of Scottish Football. The production values are just as good as the Spurs book, and this time we get what the publisher claims to be the first-ever definitive guide to Scottish football, its clubs, grounds, managers and players.

International facts and figures, European statistics and much historical information combine to make this a work that would interest any serious student of the game. Again, don’t plan on taking it with you for reference on your next job north of the Border. It weighs more than the average laptop.

Tottenham Hotspur Player By Player by Tom Morgan and Ivan Ponting (Know The Score Books, £25; published September 14)

The Encyclopaedia Of Scottish Football
by David Potter and Phil H. Jones (Know The Score Books, £24.99; published October 1)


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