Football's greatest characters - Geoff Tibballs

The history of professional football is rich in colourful characters - players, managers, referees and even chairmen. "Football's Greatest Characters" presents fascinating profiles of around seventy-five of the game's most compelling individuals - the great, the bad, and the wayward; the artists and the hard men; the legends and the forgotten heroes.In these pages, extroverts such as George Best, Emlyn Hughes, Steve Claridge, Stan Bowles, Diego Maradona, Albert Iremonger, Jose Luis Chilavert, Len Shackleton, Jimmy Greaves, Jim Baxter, Eric Cantona, Frank Worthington and Robin Friday line up alongside bone-rattling tacklers including Nobby Stiles, Billy Bremner, Harry Cripps, Brian Kilcline, Frank Barson, Stuart Pearce and Charlie Hurley. And they are all watched over by an array of eccentric managerial talent ranging from Brian Clough to Jimmy Sirrel, Bill Shankly to Alec Stock, and Tommy Docherty to Ian Holloway.This is a book where the reader can compare the styles of Tommy Smith and Tommy Banks, Roger Milla and Ian Wright, Sam Bartram and Bruce Grobbelaar, Malcolm Allison and Jose Mourinho, and one in which Vinnie Jones will only rub shoulders with Paul Gascoigne. We meet such personalities as William 'Fatty' Foulke, England's twenty-five-stone goalkeeper of the early 1900s with a penchant for burying opposing forwards head first in the penalty area; Brazilian star Garrincha, who chased women and alcohol with the same fervour that he chased a football; and Scottish lower-league winger 'Vodka' Vic Kasule who wrote off a team-mate's sports car on a trip to the off licence and who was once booked for singing a George Benson song to a referee.Spiced with anecdotes and trivia, the book presents an essential guide to the cult heroes of world football past and present.