Firstly the standard of editing is terrible, quite often there are parts of paragraphs that are repeated verbatim within a page or two & there is also too much repetition of lame cliches, all of which should really have been tightened up to make the book a bit more readable.
Ultimately though the book fails because despite what the cover promises, Glanville actually attempts no analysis on why various managers have failed to establish England as world-beaters (Alf Ramsey excepted). Instead he ends up superficially describing games that occurred during the various qualifiers & tournaments, & the manager's reaction to them, whilst providing next to no new information or opinion. This means that the prose degenerates into the jaundiced & rambling anecdotes from an old man's memoirs: memoirs which should probably have stayed private.
The closest Glanville gets to any sort of analysis is to hypothesize on the good luck, or not, of each manager, which is an astoundly weak argument for a man who has clocked up many years of supposedly incisive insight into the game. Consequently because of this general lack of insight there is an underlying tone of negativity & short-sighteness - after all, if Glanville has no idea or theories to offer he might as well just focus on the negative headlines of the day, which is exactly what he does.
I can now understand why various England managers end up revilling the press. Journalists would like to us to believe that their articles are considered pieces of opinion based on their knowledge of the technicalities of the game as well as from their relationships with players & managers. However if Glanville is supposed to be one of journalism's elder statesmen & yet he can come up with nothing more intelligent or insightful than this, it's no wonder professionals within the game get so fed up that journalists have so much influence based on such shallow & half-arsed insight: "insight" that Glanville displays in this terrible book.
1/5
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