Book description
'Fancy! A lot of working chaps beating a lot of gentlemen!'
1879, the third round of the FA Cup. A football team from the
humble Lancashire cotton town of Darwen take on Remnants - a Berkshire
club of the moneyed and well-connected - and beat them. It is
football's first ever giantkilling.
Their reward is a quarter-final with the mighty Old Etonians. It
pitches rulers against ruled, rich against poor, champions against
underdogs, old tactics against new, the inventors of the game against
the upstarts. It is an encounter that is seen as symbolic. And, hidden
at the heart of the encounter, lies the bitterest controversy.
Underdogs is a fascinating story that covers the very birth
of football and its development towards the game we recognise today.
Storyteller, football connoisseur and historian, Keith Dewhurst, shows
how 130 years ago, at its beginning, football was already reflecting
the modern game closely - money talks, cheating abounds, and victory
is secured whatever the cost.
Keith Dewhurst
has been a yarn tester in a cotton mill, a reporter for the
Manchester
Evening Chronicle
, and a columnist for the
Guardian
. Six of his seventeen stage plays have been premiered at the National
Theatre, and he is the author of more than twenty television plays, two
novels, two movies and a theatrical memoir.
