"DON'T judge a book by its cover" is a well-known maxim, and in this case it is particularly apt.
The new offering from the ubiquitous Dean Hayes (who seems to write about clubs from all points west) has a most attractive tangerine cover with portraits of Jimmy Armfield and Stan Matthews, but after that things go horribly wrong.
These A to Z books are often somewhat contrived with meaningless headings such as Away Seasons (what is an Away Season?), Plastic (what relevance has this to Blackpool Football Club?) and Zenith (well known for being a high point). But when they include so many errors that the book is not an accurate representation of the football club under discussion, they are not worth the reading.
This one even has the date of Stanley Matthews's death wrong, and by years rather than just days or months! That is the glaring error, but there are far more mistakes of which the unsuspecting reader might be unaware. It is in this way that history gets distorted and perhaps many years ago prompted Henry Ford to comment "History is Bunk!"
For example, Blackpool did not win a friendly game at Bloomfield Road on their first appearance there, Cookson did not play League football for the club, and to speculate about the smallest player ever to play for the club without plenty of research is fraught with danger.
In addition many of the facts, such as leading goalscorers, are repeated under different headings and many of the photographs feature Blackpool players in kits of other teams for which they have played when there are plenty of photographs of the same players in their tangerine strips.
In between the plethora of mistakes there are some decent facts, but to sort the wheat from the chaff is something of a major task. And that makes the book overall very disappointing and a danger to those who expect to learn from it.
Blackpool Football Club An A to Z by Dean Hayes, Aureus Publishing £7.99 ISBN 1 899750 20 7
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