Total Football

You've never seen football formations and tactic explored like they are in Total Football ever before. A must-have for football experts! A goalkeeper, two defenders and eight attackers – it’s no surprise that in the 1950s under this popular formation scores like 9-3 were common. So what changed? Total Football tells the evolution of football tactics: from the birth of Total Football in the Netherlands to the dominance of tiki taka in Spain and Brazil, each chapter explores an iconic tactic. Innovative graphics alongside expert text guide you through the manager decisions that developed new formations, the pure talent of players that defined each playing style and the matches that propelled the winning tactic to legendary status. Sanjeev Shetty explores how each tactic works, how they came to dominate and how opponents worked to find a way to beat them. From Pele to Messi, Cruyff to Mourinho, Total Football explores the tactics that made the legends, giving you a new understanding of how the beautiful game is played.

Football systems, changing room banter and a couple of mops solve the big questions of life – immortality, happiness and why England always lose, in a new play tackling the beautiful game. After several years of embedded research in the football darklands, a failed attempt to create a UK football team for the 2012 games and pathetic efforts at understanding the offside rule, Ridiculusmus is patching up its metatarsals to examine the melting pot of what it means to be British today.

The Rough Diamonds are a close knit team. Kev McGovern, their captain, makes sure they work hard and play hard. Kev is stunned when he discovers that Dave has to cope with epilepsy. When he suffers a major attack, the victory the Rough Diamonds are so desperate to win, hangs in the balance.

An action packed complete collection of the eight book Total Football series from bestselling writer Alan Gibbons. This collection contains the following stories: 1. Some You Win . . . 2. Under Pressure 3. Divided We Fall 4. Injury Time 5. Last Man Standing 6. Power Play 7. Twin Strikers 8. Final Countdown

The Netherlands has been one of the world's most distinctive and sophisticated football cultures. From the birth of Total Football in the sixties, through two decades of World Cup near misses to the exiles who remade clubs like AC Milan, Barcelona, Arsenal and Chelsea in their own image, the Dutch have often been dazzlingly original and influential. The elements of their style (exquisite skills, adventurous attacking tactics, a unique blend of individual creativity and teamwork, weird patterns of self-destruction) reflect and embody the country's culture and history. This book lays bare the elegant, fractured soul of the Dutch Masters and the culture that spawned them by exploring and analysing its key ideas, institutions, personalities and history in the context of wider Dutch society.

"For the first time ever, you'll find complete statistics for every player who has played even a single game in the NFL. Essays on the history of the game, its championship teams, and most significant games are just the beginning." "Total Football also features articles on the evolution of strategy through the years, team histories, the 300 greatest players, football families, players who enjoyed great public careers after football (such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White), and the most complete lists ever published on team rosters, awards, and the draft."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The autobiography of Dutch soccer legend Johan Cruyff, whose remarkable life and impeccable style have influenced star players and clubs for decades Johan Cruyff embodied a footballing philosophy that now dominates coaching and playing styles in all the leading club sides around the world. You can dispute whether Cruyff was the greatest player ever -- he was certainly one of the top three -- but he is undoubtedly the player who single-handedly changed the nature of the game. My Turn tells the story of Cruyff's remarkable career, built on the techniques he learned playing in the streets of postwar Amsterdam while hoping to be noticed by the city's famous club, Ajax. He would eventually inspire that team to eight league championships and three European cups. He won his first of three Ballons d'Or at twenty-four in 1971. In 1973, Cruyff was sold to Barcelona for a world-record transfer fee. He led the Catalans to victory in La Liga for the first time since 1960, and went on to leave a lasting mark on Spanish soccer. In the 1974 World Cup, Cruyff propelled the Dutch team to the final for the first time. Cruyff's lasting influence, however, is not in the medals he won, but in the style of play he epitomized and then applied to the Barcelona and Ajax teams he coached. His vision of "Total Football" transformed the way soccer was played, and its dazzling fluidity became the basis of the most admired sides around the world. He was the sport's uncompromising genius on and off the field of play.

The hottest young football players are already tearing up the gridiron. Football’s New Wave gives readers a front-row seat to this transition from one generation to the next, with pages full of information about these players, where they came from, and what makes them stand out.