FINDING THE FAR CORNER AGAIN ISIONHE

JONNY BRICK PLUCKS ANOTHER BOOK FROM THE SHELVES OF THE FOOTBALL LITERARY SOCIETY, THIS ONE A CULT CLASSIC PUBLISHED IN 1994

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M Y UNCLE Clive recommended The Far Corner to me as the best book about football.

I own a copy of the 2007 edition, which is the seventh reprint, and since Harry Pearson wrote it, his beloved Middlesbrough have reached the final of a major European competition and hired one former and two future England managers.

By the time we spoke late last year, chairman Steve Gibson had collected a complete set of Proper Football Men: Mowbray, Monk, Pulis, Woodgate, Warnock, Wilder and, currently, Michael Carrick.

Gibson's ambition, Harry says, was to have 'a team of 11 Teessiders, which was the football he grew up watching; a team of men who drank in the same pubs and grew up in the same streets'.

Harry recently went to see the Boro with his partner, who said after the game that whereas people at the Riverside are on their phones or getting up to buy stuff, in what she calls 'the little leagues, the people sit around us watch and talk about the football'.

As for TV punditry, Harry bemoans managers' obsession with refereeing decisions, which the journalists encourage: "There isn't actually any analysis.

On German TV they have an ex-player or ex-manager and an ex-journalist." Harry once met a German chap at a party who asked him what team Harry supported.

"I said Boro, and he said he was reading this really, really great book called The Far Corner. 'Have you read it?' I wrote it! It had completely passed me by that it had turned 30," chuckles Harry, who produces about a book a year on topics including agricultural shows, and, in his most recent book No Pie, No Priest, the folk sports of Britain. And how could you not be charmed by Slipless in Settle, one of Harry's many books on cricket.