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The First Game with My Father
The First Game with My Father
Nov 26, 2024 8:25 AM

Author:Michael Tierney

The First Game with My Father

In the early winter of 1983, a generous season for memories, Michael Tierney attended his first - and only - game with his father, John. For a self-employed electrician with nine children to support, this was the rarest of opportunities. Miraculously, Celtic overturned a first-leg deficit to thrash Sporting Lisbon, 5-0, with a team of home-grown talent, players that felt as one with the fans.

As the years pass, that one magical evening fades in the bustle of family commitments and the constant spectre of unemployment. Then, in 2002, John Tierney has a severe stroke that renders him immobile and unable to talk. For his wife Catherine, for Michael and his five sisters and three brothers, the landscape of life would change irrevocably. But three decades later, Michael and his wheelchair-bound parent would make an emotional return to Celtic Park.

The First Game with My Father is an evocative family memoir and a journey of discovery into lives that diverge, yet are knitted together by moments of sorrow and joy, and into the nature of identity, especially when tragedy renders a man voiceless. The most intimate portrait of a father and son and how a football team unites them in an unbreakable bond, it is also the story of a city, a community, and a treasured way of life.

Reviews

A distance of more than five years from the newspaper industry has not separated Michael Tierney from the imperative of immediately grabbing the reader by the lapels and giving the story straight and true with the concussive power of a headbutt and with a narrative that dizzies the senses… an extraordinary book.

—— The Herald

A beautiful and lyrical memoir about the transformative power of sport… wonderful style. Tierney's book adds to the canon of great sports writing, which uses sport as a way of interrogating human interaction.

—— Huffington Post

Beautifully written family memoir, set in the Catholic working-class community of Glasgow, which tells a poignant but life-affirming story of love, loss and family.

—— The Bookseller

One of the most moving stories I've ever read... I was completely blown away by it.

—— Paul Cuddihy, editor of Celtic View

So moving, I love it.

—— Damian Barr, author of Maggie and Me

A moving, masterful tome.

—— Back Page Press

The strength of the book lies in the way Dickinson has been able to go beyond football and find Moore’s real character… Dickinson’s achievement has been to honour the memory of Moore while also allowing us to understand that he was far from perfect

—— Mark Segal , When Saturday Comes

Absorbing

—— Spectator

This should be essential, sobering reading for anyone who cares about West Ham, England or English football

—— Julian Shea , Metro

Bobby Moore will rightly be forever remembered as the champion of his era, the most serenely masterful footballer ever to have hailed from these shores; “The Man in Full”, not shying away from human fallacies, serves as a reminder that he was the same as every one of us

—— Jack Gaughan , Mail Online

Full marks to Matt Dickinson

—— Steven Howard , Sun

Dickinson makes Moore sound more human… One suspects this excellent biography comes close to describing the real Moore

—— UK Press Syndication

Excellent

—— Jon Wise, 5 stars , Weekend Sport

Outstanding

—— UK Press Syndication

Dickinson manages to bring balance to this incredibly well-researched book

—— 4 stars , FourFourTwo

Dickinson is tender to the memory of the Essex lad who, for a breathtaking instant, was glorious

—— Ain Finlayson and Kate Saunders , Saga Magazine

Matt's work is the most impressive West Ham book of the year, a genuine and sincere attempt to get to the root of the man. It is an excellent, thought-provoking book

—— Knees Up Mother Brown

A compelling and complete account

—— Sport

In The Man in Full, acclaimed football writer Matt Dickinson traces the journey of this Essex boy, peeling away the layers of legend and looking at Moore’s life from all sides – in triumph, in failure, in full

—— Bert Wright , Nudge

Outstanding... this excellent biography comes very close to describing the real Bobby Moore

—— Post

An exquisitely written study of light in the works of various poets and painters.

—— Daily Telegraph

A wonderful literary meditation… This book is suffused with vivid personal memory and precise, delicate observation of Nature. Wroe’s feeling for landscape is both sensitive and acute; her style is lyrical and precise.

—— Hugo Davenport , Resurgence and Ecologist

A book for winter.

—— Honor Clerk , Spectator, Books of the Year

People of faith talk a great deal about light, and we would do well to learn more about it from Wroe’s quick-eyed love of it.

—— Mark Oakley , Church Times

Wroe passes her elusive subject, light itself, through the prism of her dazzlingly well-read mind, and the resulting rainbows fairly dance across the page… An utterly original book that will leave you, in every sense of the word, enlightened.

—— Claire Lowdon , Sunday Times, Book of the Year

Ann Wroe’s Six Facets of Light is a fascinating and original meditation [on light]. Six Facets of Light is an exquisite collage of relations, a prose poem to “what escaped” absolutely everyone – and to how madly, brilliantly, they tried to “be in step”.

—— Joanna Kavenna , Times Literary Supplement
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