Full Time: The Secret Life Of Tony Cascarino - Softcover

Kimmage, Paul

4.1

804 ratings by Goodreads

9780743285315: Full Time: The Secret Life Of Tony Cascarino

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074328531X ISBN 13: 9780743285315

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK, 2005

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Full Time In this compelling and sensationally honest book, Paul Kimmage strips away the public facade of an international football star. Tony Cascarino is a man scarred by childhood, haunted by indiscretion and troubled by a secret from his past. A man struggling to find answers as he speeds towards the most terrifying juncture in sport. The End. Full description

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Review:

Full Time: the Secret Life of Tony Cascarino is the most praised football autobiography in a very long time. Reviewers' jaws dropped at "the searing honesty ... and the breathless style" (The Saturday Times); The Observer Sport Monthly gasped "It's Angela's Ashes with half-time oranges ... a footballer's autobiography like no other. The most astonishing sports book of the year." "Autobiography" of course means ghost-written: though told in the first person it was put together by award-winning Irish journalist Paul Kimmage, whose Rough Ride won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 1990. Making the book compulsively readable Kimmage structured it brilliantly, guarding the series of secrets that Cascarino reveals so that the reader is tantalised by cryptic glimpses then made to wait until each revelation in turn is suddenly unveiled. What are these secrets? Suffice to say that some are personal, some professional, some minor and quirky, one major enough to generate heated debate in the press. At times the book reads like the confession of a man who's lived with too much guilt for too long.

Throughout, the book maintains a very high standard. It veers towards the blandness for which footballers' autobiographies are famous only when the author is discussing his friends, to whom he is commendably loyal. As for his managers, there are several memorable portraits. In the case of Jack Charlton it's open hero-worship, even when he felt hard done by. Relations with Glenn Hoddle were a very different story. "He was probably the unfunniest man I have ever known. He was also completely besotted with himself ... When you stepped offside with Glenn, there was nothing to do but accept your fate and hope that you returned in the next life as talented and as perfect as him."

The Guardian said, "Compared with the standard-issue footballer's autobiography, this is Tolstoy." Perhaps not quite, but it's brilliant storytelling, and gives a shockingly honest portrait of one footballer and his world. --David Pickering

Review:

'An extraordinary book... Cascarino has something to say and having started has been brave and/or reckless enough not to stop.' --Observer

'If it were fiction this book could win the Booker Prize... Full Time belongs with the finest sports books ever written.' --Eamon Dunphy, The Times

'... but why did Tony Cascarino want to share all this with us? We know now, and it was a privilege to have been introduced. Far more than the goals, this is Tony Cascarino's legacy to the game.' --David Walsh, Sunday Times

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