Rick Gekoski – Staying Up

Football clubs have long been notoriously secretive about what goes on behind the imposing club gates. Having seen the fly-on-the wall documentary which exposed then England coach Graham Taylor as a hapless and foul-mouthed loser, who can blame them? So it’s to Coventry’s huge credit that Rick Gekoski, a long-time fan despite being an American academic, was allowed in to chronicle their 1997/98 season. Gekoski, like everyone else, was expecting yet another battle against relegation for the Sky Blues. In fact Coventry actually finished in a respectable mid-table position, and they don’t come out of this book too badly either. Gekoski really does give a flavour of the modern game as he probes the club’s finances, transfer deals, tactics and personality clashes. He makes some remarkable claims for the manhood of a key player and as the book progresses he increasingly annoys the Coventry manager Gordon Strachan. But as Strachan himself magnanimously said when it was all over: „If I had known that you were going to write this sort of book I would never have allowed you access to myself or the team. Having said that, I think it is one of the best books about football ever written. The closest anybody could get to what it is really like”. –Nick Wroe