Steak...Diana Ross

Author:

By David McVay

Format:

Paperback

Availability:

In print, usually dispatched within 3-4 days.

Price:

£9.95

Tagged with:

Football, Biography, Notts County FC

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Further Details

• Published: 1st Feb 2003
• ISBN: 1903158370
• Pages: 184

From Word of Sport:

These insightful and often hilarious diaries of David McVay (now of The Times) were written during his formative years as a teenager with Notts Countyin the '70s. A wonderfully told tale of camaraderie, drink, women and football.

From the Publisher:

It opens on a rubbish tip that doubles for a training ground littered with refuse engineers - known in those distant pre-politically correct days of 30 years ago as dustmen - and ends, more or less, at Elland Road, home of Leeds United and the European Cup finalists the previous season. The diaries of David McVay, written during his formative years as a teenager with Notts County during the 1970s, invite readers on an undulating and nostalgic soccer sojourn that can never be repeated in the context of the modern game.
McVay's jottings create an evocative tapestry of a bygone and almost innocent age for football and his contemporary observations and insights deftly portray the decade that style forgot but one which still gives a generation sleepless nights.
From February 1974 to October 1975, the scenery varies from The Shay at Halifax to Old Trafford while the cast of characters includes such luminaries as Don Revie and Brian Clough; the Ford Capri and Cortina provide the car chases with background music courtesy assorted artists such as Slade, Yes and Nick Drake. Of course nobody takes the credit for the wardrobe or dress sense director.
On the pitch, Manchester United visit Meadow Lane and their fans almost destroy it as Jimmy Sirrel, the Notts County manager whose marvellous idiosyncrasies illuminate the book, repels the Mancunian hordes with a bunion scalpel. Off it, Paul Smith opens his first boutique in the backstreets of Nottingham (his prices have risen steadily since) while the Exorcist and Abba arrive in equally garish manner.
Steak... Diana Ross - Diary of a Football Nobody, celebrates with candid humour the team ethic and provincial camaraderie that was endemic in the sport long before the foreign legions invaded. The drink was always strong but the women stronger as a raw and diverse mixture of combustible personalities, thrown together into the community of the dressing room, strived desperately to win matches and remain friends despite a hectic social calendar.

From the Critics:

“The flavour of the club is brilliantly captured in a recently published memoir called Steak... Diana Ross by the Times journalist David McVay, who played for them in the mid-70s as a teenage midfielder and writes amusingly of the days when younger first-team players still took the bus to training and an ability to sink pints was still a measure of a footballer's manhood.”

Richard Williams, The Guardian

“Steak... Diana Ross is a revealing snapshot of the life of a mid-seventies second division footballer. The author David McVay, or McBay as his manager insisted on calling him, went on to become a Times football writer but these are extracts from his actual diary. References vary from ELO to Mick Channon, Nick Drake to Viv Anderson. It's so far from the dull autobiographies of most players it actually reads like fiction.”

James Brown, Jack Magazine