An unflinchingly honest exploration of dementia and football from 1970s Bolton, Burnley and Blackpool striker Paul Fletcher.Written with respected football writer Dave Thomas, author of more than 30 football books.Features a contribution from Bryony Hill, whose late husband, the famous footballer and TV personality Jimmy Hill, was a dementia sufferer.The number of footballers who have succumbed to dementia is horrifying. A name appears in the press ...

Burnley, Champions Again! tells the story of the incredible promotion season that Vincent Kompany inspired and organised at Burnley FC.At the end of season 2021/22 the club found themselves relegated and managerless. With players wanting to leave, the club needing to sell them and fans worried the owners might decide to desert a sinking ship, the future looked bleak.But the worries were unfounded. Vincent Kompany was brought in as manager. He spoke...

Former Burnley FC director Clive Holt brings us the inside track on his 35 years at the club in a compelling memoir chock-full of anecdotes and previously untold stories. Every committee or boardroom needs someone who can ask awkward questions and see what might be coming around the next corner. Clive was that man at Burnley FC. Wherever Burnley were playing, he rarely missed a match, whether those dreadful games of the old Fourth Division when Burnley were in the doldrums, or the heady af...

Paul Weller was a one-club player. He moved from sunny Brighton aged just 16 to dreary Burnley, with its grey skies, run-down terraced streets and mill chimneys, where riots were among the first things he saw. A more timid person might have caught the first train home. But he went on to play 252 games for the Clarets between 1993 and 2005. He would have played many more but for suffering the debilitating effects of colitis. It took a huge chunk out of his career, forcing him out of the fir...

Software development is inherently complex, but it needn't be as complicated as we make it. Learn to recognize and deal with the gnarly stuff, and your job is simpler, your code is easier to create and to work with, and you are more effective. You won't find a bunch of rules, practices, and clever acronyms here. There are no best practices, because there's no such thing as a best practice. You'll cut through real-world complexities to discover and amplify what works best for you in your cu...

Jimmy Adamson was a soccer enigma, revered by some, disliked by others—a supremely elegant player of the 1950s and early 1960s, a title winner, and a respected coach, but a manager whose spirit was ultimately shattered. In 1962, Adamson had the world at his feet: FA Cup finalist, Footballer of the Year and invited to become England manager, having been assistant at the World Cup in Chile. But Adamson said no. In 1970 he predicted that Burnley would become the "Team of the Seventies," but d...

Details the management philosophy of Sean Dyche, which enabled a sporting David to compete with the GoliathsOnce upon a time, on April 21, 2014, something extraordinary happened, as unfashionable Burnley sealed their promotion to the Premier League. It was the improbable culmination to one of the most magical, inspirational, and unpredictable stories in the modern game. This is English soccer's Moneyball. At the start of the season, the Lancashire club wer...

The biography of controversial Burnley chairman Bob Lord, the self-made butcher who ruled the club from 1955 to 1981. A blunt, opinionated leader, football's own 'Khrushchev' upset many with his views; but he had the idea of running a club on businesslike lines, and oversaw a production line of top players then sold on to sustain his vision.

Champions is the story of Burnley's Championship title win of season 2015/16. In the world of the big city football clubs, Burnley remains the club from the small town that continues to defy the odds through its good management and careful budgeting. This is the third promotion to the Premier League in just seven years. It was a season that began tentatively, after relegation. Three key players had been sold, and the first month produced nothing too special. Two key additions were...

A Director's Tale is the story of Burnley Football Club in the early 1980s, a time of short-lived success and then turmoil. With special access to the diaries of director Derek Gill, Dave Thomas brings you the unvarnished inside story, revealing what went on behind the scenes amid conflict with chairman John Jackson and manager John Bond. These were torrid times involving, at first, a surprise promotion, then a relegation, then John Bond's departure and another relegation. This was a group...

Ruby is one of the most important programming languages in use for web development. It powers the Rails framework, which is the backing of some of the most important sites on the web. The Pickaxe Book, named for the tool on the cover, is the definitive reference on Ruby, a highly-regarded, fully object-oriented programming language. This updated edition is a comprehensive reference on the language itself, with a tutorial on the most important features of Ruby - including pattern matching a...

Mud, Sweat and Sheers is the story of how a miner became one of football's leading groundsmen. It tells how he met some of the greatest names in the 1970s and 1980s. A unique football book through a groundsman's eyes, it tells the story of what typically went on behind the scenes before football became the multi-million-pound industry it is today.