Customer Reviews

COMRADE JIM: The Spy Who Played for Spartak

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I was electrified when i just noticed this book and immediately scooped it.
The story seemed so interesting that I couldn't sit still until i passed the book to my English teacher, who was in football business those days (never a pro himself but was through youth squads of 50-s/60-s and therefore retained many connections with the guys who actually made it into the first teams of Moscow based Soviet Premiership clubs). Of course he was an avid football fan and a staunch supporter of preciesely Spartak Moscow.
His immediate reaction after reading this opus was bewilderment. He never encountered any Riordan or Jordanov playing in starting XI or coming in as sub. Moreover factual errors were of extraordinary brazen character. Like pointed out in another review the man confused the venue at which the game took place: Tashkent (now in Uzbekistan) for Moscow which are 1 700 miles apart (according to Google Earth), let alone climatic and geographical differences which are still evident even to a blindman.
This and other glaring inconsistencies forced him to give a call to pro players, then active, and ask for clarification. No one could remember such player. And to conceal such a player would be harder than hide the proverbial needle in a haystack. Just so you know: there were few players of foreign origin (f.e. Spaniards - kids of Spanish Reds - evacuated in the wake of the Spanish Civil War to USSR) in Soviet Championship those years. And everyone remembers their presence nowadays albeit not always their names.
And no one even remebers a Briton, if you don't trust official statistics. Sorry. Nothing personal. But please don't sell a fiction for a real story.
If he was a real player it would be trumpeted all over as triumph of Communist sport's attractiveness over "sweat-extracting" professional sport of "rotting West".

Yes, the author played for Spartak and that's about as much as this book mentions football. This is hardly a book about football although it does feature the game in several instances, I would hardly consider this book a "football" book.