Customer Reviews

Farewell But Not Goodbye

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For a lover of the game this book was just awesome. Sir Bobby is not yet done, though his days in the limelight are certainly past, this book captures many of the times, and goals, and games, that led to establishment of one of the games most brilliant and well respected managers. Watching Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United Manager, chew his gum and spit it into his right hand just a second before he shakes your hands, shows the vast difference between the two men. Both are brilliant football/soccer tacticians but only Sir Bobby is a gentleman. One of the last. An eye watering journey down memory lane. Enjoy.

You might think it would be hard for a former manager of the England soccer team (and a good one at that), a former England player as well as one of the best club managers of his generation to produce a boring book about his exploits, but Bobby Robson has done just that. This has all the hallmarks of a work which was slapped down onto paper with no planning at all. We jerk around from his playing career (we never learn how he became a player) to management of Ipswich, then a backwater club in England. He wins a major European soccer title (something little short of astonishing) but gives us no idea how he did it, how he managed to inspire a collection of largely obscure players to great heights. Instead we have a boring list of "We beat this side, and then that side, and then another side" and before we know it he's in Holland, then Spain and then a chapter later he's back in England, always whining on about money. The man must be a millionaire many times over but we're treated to endless paragraphs about how he fought for the money he felt he was entitled to. In short, this is an awful book.