Product Description

Nephews of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, John Cavendish Cobbold and Patrick Mark Cobbold were both chairman of Ipswich Town FC during the club's most successful and high-profile years. Both Old Etonians and heavy drinkers, this account of their time in charge of the club and their lives outside football is full of entertaining anecdotes. The brothers were known for their practical jokes and worked closely with the two greatest Ipswich and England managers of all time - Ramsay and Robson.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169422 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

About the Author
Brian Scovell is currently a freelance journalist, but has written for the Daily Mail, Evening Standard and Sunday Telegraph on both football and cricket for more than forty years. He has written 18 sports book in the past, including bestsellers on Dickie Bird, Trevor Brooking and Lawrie McMenemy.

Customer Reviews

Rambling and disappointing
As a fan of Ipswich Town during the club's great days of the seventies and early eighties I was delighted to receive this book as a Christmas present. What a disappointment it is!
The Cobbold brothers - aristocratic, eccentric, humorous, hard-drinking, often rude, but ultimately charming - were the chairmen of the football club during its most exciting period, the 20 years during which it won the League Championship, the FA Cup and the UEFA Cup. Brian Scovell attempts their biography with a patchwork of anecdotes, poorly structured and often veering off at tangents. If he mentions a name, he cannot resist putting in everything he knows about that person, a bad habit which often leads him far away from what he was originally trying to say. There are also errors of detail clearly apparent to anyone who knows the Ipswich area (Great Horse Hotel - twice! - when it should be Great White Horse, for example).
I would have expected far better from someone with a long career as a sports writer, but it seems he is one of those journalists who cannot make the transition to writing in an extended format, when thoughts need to be properly organised.
Somewhere, there is a good book waiting to be written about these fascinating men, the last standard-bearers of a bygone sporting age. Sadly, this isn't it.