The Double
by Ken Ferris
220 Pages
Published by Two Heads Publishing (1996)
ISBN 1-897850-82-4
A prolific football writer and many of his books being about Spurs, Ken Ferris tackles the well-known story of our League and Cup winning season of 1960-1961.
This book chronicles the years leading up to 1960-61 and the way the side was brought together by Bill Nicholson. It also details the background of what was happening at Tottenham, as well as what was going on in football in general during a turbulent time for the game.
Giving the full picture of how the club changed from the “Push And Run” side of Arthur Rowe in the early 1950s to the team that Bill Nicholson formed along Rowe’s lines, but with a re-constructed squad that produced one of the greatest of all time, Ferris has to delve back into the mid-1950s. Not only does the writer provide excellent match reports (with quotes from newspapers of the time and other sources), but paints detailed pen pictures of the players and the manager involved that season and, at the end, even does a “Where Are They Now” resume which reflects the challenging nature of life after a football career had finished for players of that era.
The style does not quite flow in the way the football played by the subjects did, but the book is highly readable and the chapters are fairly short, so you seem to fly through them. However, it is the little details that turn what would have been merely a factual account of a fantastic season into a fully rounded book that does a very good job of informing those who never saw this side in the flesh just how famous they deserve to be. And in thirty years time, will they be writing books about Manchester City’s side ???
Marco van Hip