Only A Game?

"This is a cult book among those of us who like reading about football. It came out in the 1970s when really no one was publishing books about football. Eamon Dunphy was a very run-of-the-mill professional footballer in London, playing for Millwall, of Irish origin. And he sat down with a journalist to write this book about what it’s really like to be a footballer: The daily life, the grind, the stress, the frustrations with your team-mates, with the manager, the worries about money. At some point Millwall say, ‘OK, we’ve had it with you, we’re going to sell you!’ and he comes home to his house, and even his house belongs to the club. And he thinks, ‘What am I going to do? I’m 28 years old, I don’t own my own house, I’ve got another couple of years left and then it’s all over.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So he has these real anxieties, and he’s dropped from the first team, and he’s supposed to go along and watch, and he doesn’t. He just sits at home and watches Crossroads on the telly, because he thinks, ‘If I go and watch I’ll just be sitting there hoping they’ll lose and that’s just too miserable, I can’t do that.’ So it ends up being a very miserable season, but again all the characters in the book come to life. Dunphy, who was, like most footballers of his day, a very working-class lad, from a poor Irish family, became, off the back of it, a very successful journalist. He has written a couple of other big-selling football books; he also wrote a biography of U2. He was just a man with talent, and this book was a discovery of that talent. It’s a book that tells you what it really is like to be a professional footballer, and it’s not very pretty. No, it’s a small club in south London: They always were and they are now. Their home ground was in a street called Coldblow Lane, so it was really miserable, a very unglamorous existence. Dunphy had, for a short time, as a young footballer, been at Manchester United, where he knew fellow Irishman George Best. So he’d very briefly tasted the glamour of Manchester United, but he didn’t make it and ended up at very unglamorous Millwall, where he spent most of his career."