Product Description

The life of a roving sports reporter is one to which most men and quite a lot of women aspire. Surely it would be full of glitz and glamour, packed with boozy nights on the road and hob-nobbing with the stars. Wouldn't it? Only partly. In "Behind The Back Page" award-winning sports writer Christopher Davies, veteran of the "Daily Telegraph" for over 30 years, tells the hilarious and sometimes poignant stories of his 40 years in the business following international sports as varied as football to croquet to the SuperBowl in places as varied as Washington DC, Malaysia, Colombia, Japan, Portugal, Argentina, New York, Nigeria and Albania, where local customs and world events such as 9/11 often cross his path.He has hob-nobbed with the best, including David Beckham, Andy Gray, Roy Keane, Baddiel and Skinner, Barry Davies, Jack Charlton and, er, Graham Poll. But he has also been pickpocketed by Colombian drug barons, offered a man's wife for the night in return for an exclusive on a story, mistaken for Christ, learned to Shag in New Orleans, and spied on by the KGB. His hilarious memoirs make fascinating reading for anyone with a passing interest in sport of any kind or the reality of being a sports writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50872 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
Inspired - Henry Winter, The Times. One of the funniest things I have ever read - Peter Drury, ITV Sport. Prepare to be entertained - Alan McKinlay, Daily Mirror. A funny guy. Funny ha-ha that is! - Ian Ridley, Mail On Sunday. Davies recounts the hardships and the pleasures with persistent wit, and does not insist that we feel sorry for him! - Andrew Baker, Daily Telegraph. Behind The Back Page is a lovely book. Funny and poignant - Anton Ripon.

Peter Drury, ITV Sport
One of the funniest things I have ever read -

Alan McKinlay, Daily Mirror
Prepare to be entertained

Customer Reviews

Sadly disappointing
I love football. I love travel. I'm also quite interested in how the journalism that we consume by the yard or megabyte comes to be. I loved Pete Davies's account of following the 1990 World Cup in Italy - one of my all time favourite books. I'm even an admirer of the high quality of sports writing in the Daily Telegraph (for whom the author of this book plied his trade). The icing on the cake was the lavish praise for the book on the front and back cover and front papers. So I had a pretty high expectation that I was going to love it.

Unfortunately, I couldn't have been more disappointed.

The book's author, Christopher Davies, reminds me very much of the TV series Grumpy Old Men, in which middle aged and elderly blokes rant on about the trivia of life that annoys them.... except that the blokes on GOM are funny. This book largely consists of a tediously detailed and very repetitive diary of every breakfast, snack and dinner eaten by the author during various expeditions to international football friendlies and tournaments, with a large amount of toilet humour and sad puns. There's also a lot of tedious detail and moaning about train departures and IT issues. It's full of the sort of travel delay story you would stop listening to after about 15 seconds if your best friend started telling you about it because it's so incredibly boring - only there's several hundred pages of it.

What there's incredibly little of, unfortunately, is anything about the football this guy was paid to write about. He was not a "number one" on the Daily Telegraph team so he never got sent to cover any England games... so don't expect any juicy gossip or insight into the England camp from this book. Instead, he seems to have covered Ireland in most tournaments, and when they failed to qualify (or got knocked out, ie fairly early on) he reported on matches like Mexico-Iran - although again don't expect any detailed observations on the games short of "it was colourful but dull". There's a little bit about the Roy Keane episode in the 2002 World Cup, but it's mainly told from the point of view of how the whole thing messed up the author's meal, sleep and transport schedule, and gives very little insight into what really happened or how a story like that gets covered. If you are interested in how sports reports are put together: where they get their information from, how they decide which angle to take, do journalists share or compare notes, do they ever suffer from writer's block... you won't find it here. There's no mention of Davies ever speaking to any players or management in any of the team camps, except once or twice at official press conferences - he uses the excuse that players are a lot more inaccessible than they used to be, but I can't help wondering how other football writers seem to carry on getting access and stories from these sources.

There's sadly almost nothing that attempts to get under the skin of the nations that hosted these tournaments, or the fans that followed the visiting teams - apart from trite observations along the lines of "however our Japanese hosts were very friendly" or "the German organisation was very efficient". When faced with a day without a game to attend, Davies concentrates on moaning about how he's the only British sports reporter in town and there's noone to drink beer or dine with. Well hello, isn't that an opportunity to break loose of the crowd and actually go write something interesting that noone else has?

I know this sounds pretty damning, but, well - it was a pretty awful book, given the author was a professional journalist. All I can imagine is that someone suggested as joke that he occupy his retirement by writing down some of the old legends and yarns going round the sports hack circuit, and that he padded it out by including great excerpts of his daily food and transport diary.

As for the lavish praise I saw on the book's front papers when I first picked it up... well, I've solved that mystery too. Cunningly, all the way through the book Davies has sprinkled sentences along the lines of "X is the best all round sports journalist writing today" , "Y is a superb writer, one of the best in the business", "Z is a great guy, one of the most popular sports writers in Fleet Street" And guess what? All the praise for his book is by the very same professional hacks.

Not a bad book
On balance, I'd say this book is worth buying and reading. It's probably not the best book of its genre to be honest, but it passes the time and it provides a funny(-ish) insight into the life of a sports journalist, even if it doesn't tell us anything we probably already didn't already know.

Wise Old Bird? Sad Old Sourpuss!

Don't be put off by WOB's negative review - this book is wonderful!

There are plenty of serious "docudrama" sports books out there, some of them excellent, many of them dreary. If that's what you want, go get one.

This is something different - the diary of a professional sports journalist. It's a witty, refreshing and always entertaining account of the seamy reality of his job, from someone who doesn't take himself or life too seriously.

Very highly recommended!

(And I'm still laughing at Paul "Plat Du" Shaw!)