Product Description

'For those old enough to remember Duncan Edwards, watching Professor Williams, Best's doctor, was to be reminded of the slower, grainier days of 1958 when, in the words of Don DeLillo, "things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day". The hero is the creature other people would like to be. Edwards was such a man, and he enabled people to respect themselves more.' By the mid-fifties Manchester United had caught the imagination of the country. Duncan Edwards played his first game for the club at the age of fifteen years and eight months in 1953. Two years later he won his first England cap and Walter Winterbottom, then England manager, referred to him as 'the spirit of British football'. On GBP 15-a-week and living at Mrs Watson's boarding house at 5 Birch Avenue in Manchester, Edwards was the most prized of the Busby Babes. Then in February 1958 came Munich. Half a decade later George Best represented United reborn. 'Georgie' of the boutiques and dolly birds; 'El Beatle' of the European Cup in '68 and European Player of the Year; in the opinion of Pele, the most naturally talented footballer that ever lived. Retired at twenty-seven and reduced to the role of Chelsea barfly and tabloid perennial; George, where did it all go wrong? An investigation into a club, two personalities and an England that has all but disappeared, "Best and Edwards" plots the course and trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #309746 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 255 pages

Alan Pattullo, The Scotsman
An elegiac, handsome contemplation

Alan Chadwick, Metro
A detailed and coruscating look at different generational sporting
and social mores, dependency and the changing emphasis of celebrity.

Sean O'Brien, Independent
This eloquent, sorrowful and angry book adds much to our
understanding of what the game has lost.

Customer Reviews

Absorbing Read
This is a rarity - an intellegent book about football. Every true football fan and - especially - every Manchester United fan should read it. As well as being about two of the greatest players the British game has produced it's about what has happened to the game - and indeed Britan itself - over the past fifty years. Although the book is about Edwards and Best the fulcrum around which it turns is actually Bobby Charlton. This book is written with intellegence and insight and is light years away from the normal fare served up to football followers. If you love and care about the British game then read this book. It's brilliant.

An awesome book about an awesome duo.
Right from the beginning of this superb book it`s pretty obvious that Gordon Burn is not a football writer. He avoids the long, boring passages found in virtually all football writing which describe how so and so crossed the ball for what`s his name in the thirty-fifth minute of the match. Instead of that type of dross he goes for the jugular of his subjects. Duncan Edwards and George Best. Chalk and cheese yet peas in a pod. Both Manchester United legends, both gone before they should have gone. Edwards a product of the short back and sides era, Best the first real playboy football star. The common links with the two of them are Matt Busby and Bobby Charlton. Great football men in their own right. Both men survived the Munich horror which claimed Edwards and both men witnessed George Best`s career die an early death. The main thrust of the book is the contrast between the lifestyles of the two title characters and how society had changed drastically in the few years separating their appearances. I have read every book written about George, but I discovered some interesting, and not always flattering, facts here. As for Duncan, the more I read the more I regret never having seen him play. Awesome.

Dunc and Disorderly
While eyeing the shelves groaning this season with semi-literate footballers' 'autobiographies' with as much longevity as, well, as a premiership footballer, spare a thought for Best and Edwards, a real work of literature - of art, even - about football, by a real writer.

Gordon Burn has tackled "the psychopathology of fame" before - most notably in his novel Alma Cogan - and here he comes at it from two angles, featuring the "trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways." Duncan Edwards, the rising star of Manchester United and England, died in the Munich air crash in 1958 aged 21. Within the next 10 years Man U would have a new star, George Best, considered by Pele to be "the greatest footballer in the world." Best died too, but only after decades of alcohol abuse and one of the most ignominious descents ever witnessed in broad daylight by the eyes of the world and the media.

And the media is the third character in this extraordinary book. Because what Burn is interested in is not just the contrasting stories of Edwards and Best, but the whole shift in fame that occurred then, when fame went and 'celebrity' arrived. "Celebrity," in Burn's eyes, "is an indicator of how far fame has come adrift from real achievement - of how personality has replaced output as the measure of fame." And this leads him into the sort of analysis that we don't expect in soccer biographies (but this is no mere soccer biography):

"This is a kind of fame that can be - almost always is - conveniently and irretrievably wiped. It is a thin, weightless thing and mostly exists as a series of electronically generated pulses and pixels. Often it is literally without foundation or substance and is typically memorialised as a brand of designer fragrance or on a T-shirt or on a website rather than in the heavy, industrial-age materials of stained glass and granite and bronze. It is an inevitable fallout of the galloping and still ongoing process which has seen the electronic society of the image - the daily bath we all take in the media - replace the real community of the crowd.

"Cyber-age celebrity relates to the kind of old-fashioned renown rooted in genuine public affection and recognised achievement the way the various system-built, semi-prefabricated, part-plastic urban structures we have come to think of as post-modern relate to the heavy Victorian banks, lawyers' chambers and sooty civic buildings that in the great northern cities so often still surround them, like elderly relatives at a rave night."

This is what Burn does best, as well as splicing in quotes from richly literary sources from Martin Amis to Patrick Hamilton and Philip Roth to Don DeLillo, on sport, pubs, fame and other related matters. But the story keeps spiralling back to the title duo, and the final account of Best's decline is horrible and heartstoppingly tragic.

This is a book that will - or should - still be read when the pulped puff-pieces by Cole, Rooney and co are next year's egg cartons. It is a modern masterpiece about the times we live in, now and then.