Books

Reading matter for footie fans

An A-Z without our only £1m man?

Dean Hayes, Wrexham Football Club: An A-Z (Sigma Leisure, Paperback , £6.95)

This book was given to me as a birthday present, and it was just hot off the press. With its colour front-cover with pictures of great Wrexham players from the past and a team photo, you immediately get the idea of what is to come.

It is a compact little book that offers up easy-to-read sections as it is, as it suggests, an A-Z (there is even an entry under X). Within its covers are many pictures to accompany the sections, mainly of players from the great seventies’ teams and of the more recent players.

This book avoids getting bogged down with statistics and just concentrates on the most essential facts about players and things in general. For a new fan to Wrexham, this would be the ideal guide to explain our heritage and some of our great players from the past. However, for a lifetime Wrexham fan, this would be indeed ‘old hat’ and wouldn’t be sufficient.

One problem with it is that it was already out of date when it went to press. Some of the entries, such as Wayne Phillips’, tend to suggest that he is still at the club and there is no mention of Bryan Hughes being the first million pound player to leave this club.

This does point to the fact that the writer of this book is not in fact a Robins fan but a commercial writer; even so, most things are indeed correct. In any case, any book that Paul Burrell (our most famous fan to date) endorses can’t be all that bad - and in fact isn’t.

Final verdict: a worthwhile purchase for a new fan or younger fans, but this will not satisfy the need of many of the long-term fans. Still, I enjoyed it.

Matthew Kelly