The Amazon reviews- amazing..
""Football? Bloody hell!", as Bill Shankly once said.
By the final chapter of this book I was kneeling on the floor of my living room, floods of tears pattering onto my replica kit, wailing like a hysterical gibbon. My dogs, Rushie and Aldo, wailed in solidarity with me. They understood; my wife didn't. I felled her with a right hook.
Imagine if all you ever wanted was a carrot cake, and then, after 25 years without one, you see your most loyal friend walking towards your house smiling, carrying a carrot cake with your name on it. As he reaches your drive, he tumbles calamitously into a ditch. You rush out to find him writhing in agony amongst a cakey-muddy mess, a hungry raven pecking at his flesh. That is how we Liverpool fans feel about the 13/14 season (the raven is Tony Pulis, by the way).
This book is not just some cynical cash-in to make money out of Irish people.
Paul Tomkins has truly encapsulated the modern-day Liverpool Football Club experience in literary form: the misty-eyed sentimentality, the endless self-mythologizing and, above all, the abject, humiliating failure. YNWA."
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"Brendan Rodgers treated me to the biggest emotional rollercoaster on the planet, not even Alton Towers could reach its peaks, lows and loop de loops.This book brings it all back.
I remember the Chelsea game like it was yesterday. Me, me auld fella, titch and spanners all donned our full warrior kits, tied our 5 times flags around our necks like makeshift capes and marched for the Shankly gates. We bought our CHAMPIONS 13/14 t-shirts outside, made our way onto the kop and laughed as the Chelsea team was read out. During our mirth, I turned to my brethren and told them there was no way Chelsea were going to score today, the only way they will is if Gerrard falls flat on his face and gives them the ball, right in front of all of us. And he would not let it slip. We all shed tears of laughter.
That evening, after much arguing, binning of champions shirts, seething, mild violence and tears, I went for a walk. Cape still flapping behind me like a kingly robe, kit still held snug to my flesh, looking like a Sports Direct Superman..I still held hope. Crystal Palace would be blitzed. Sure, it was dark. Sure, I was walking down the hard shoulder of the M57 getting beeped. But not as sure as I was about our destiny. Suarez had been persecuted for nothing, now it was time for vengeance.
As our third went in at Selhurst Park I turned to Spanners and held him. "You were right!" he cried, "Its going to be a massacre!" I put my arm around my auld fella and we laughed, "all our defenders would have to switch off now for Palace to get a chance and they'll be lucky to get one, never mind three!" I bellowed.
That evening, I walked back to the train station alone. Legs tired from running. Cape tattered and torn from where Titch and Spanners had pulled at it. Friendships lost forever. Even me auld fella had gone home with them. But this book reminded me of what I once had, our season might have been a failure in some eyes. But not mine. We go again. YNWA."
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"As a Barnet FC fan, I've been accustomed to never winning anything.
But this book is marvellous, this book performs a miracle but making it "cool" to not win anything.
Liverpool didn't win anything despite spending £154 million on transfers across the past 3 seasons (according to transferleague.co.uk)....
But this book portrays them as a team of "dreamers" who went so close.
I love it, it gives me hope that one day Barnet can spend over a hundred and fifty million pounds and still not win anything.
I can only dream"
