Lancashire has had a major role to play in English football, from Preston North End's 'Invincibles' to the European trophy winners of Manchester and Merseyside. This is the story of these great rivals, their triumphs, scandals and tragedies, and the great players who have kept the red rose to the fore at home and abroad. Lancashire has had a major role to play in English football from its earliest days to the present. The county's leading clubs were largely responsible for the introduction of professionalism in the 1880s, after Preston North End admitted paying their players, and the world's first Football League was divided between teams from the North West and the Midlands. Preston's 'Invincibles' triumphed in that first competition before adding the FA Cup that two different Blackburn clubs had already won - and soon the great clubs of Merseyside and Manchester were winning their first trophies. As the turf wars developed, Blackpool, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Bury and Oldham all made their mark in the top division; clubs such as Rochdale and Wigan fought the good fight in rugby hotbeds; and more recently Fleetwood and Morecambe have carried the name of their towns further afield. This is the story of these great rivals, their triumphs, scandals and tragedies, and the great players who have kept the red rose to the fore at home and abroad.A

In the third volume of the acclaimed Turf Wars series, journalist and broadcaster Steve Tongue looks at the history of football in the West Midlands, where the world's first Football League was dreamed up and administered more than 130 years ago. Fierce rivalries had already emerged by then, and have remained as strong as anywhere. Aston Villa and Birmingham City (as Small Heath Alliance) were founded within a year of each other, only a few miles apart, as were equally bitter neighbours West Bromwich Albion and Wolves. And just as in London and Lancashire, turf wars were fought off the pitch too. In Burton and Walsall, the biggest local clubs once amalgamated to carry the name of their town forward. But what an outcry there was in the Potteries when Stoke City and Port Vale almost did the same. This is the story of them all, large and small, and non-league too with a colourful cast of characters - Stanley Matthews and Billy Wright, Major Frank Buckley and Ron Atkinson, William McGregor, Jimmy Hill and 'Deadly' Doug Ellis among them.

Description to come.

Few cities in the world have as many professional football clubs as London and none have the history explored in this book by journalist and broadcaster Steve Tongue. It was in the English capital that the Football Association - the first of its kind anywhere - was founded in 1863 and that the FA Cup, the world's most famous domestic cup competition, was born. After the North and Midlands dominated the first forty-odd years of league football, three clubs in particular - Arsenal, Spurs and Chelsea - began to challenge them and eventually succeeded, joining West Ham United as trophy winners not only at home but in Europe. Between those four clubs, and more than a dozen other professional clubs past and present, grew the turf wars that are the bedrock of the great rivalries and derbies across England's most vibrant football city. Turf Wars tells the story of football in the capital.

A landmark new history of the great English county of Lancashire, exploring its people's impact on Britain and beyond.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Great Civil War in Lancashire (1642-1651)" by Ernest Broxap. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Crime fiction has just got much, much too real for comfort...|Ray Cragg is one of the country's biggest gangsters. His patch extends from Birmingham to the Scottish borders, dealing in drugs, prostitution and illegal immigrants. The cops are desperate to nail him. When Marty, Cragg's brother and side-kick, ends up with his face blown off having been sent by Cragg to "whack" one of Cragg's henchman who had run off with a million pounds of laundered money, Detective Inspector Henry Christie gets sucked in to the world of ultra-organized crime which knows no international or moral boundaries... |"Shows just how brutal the British underworld can be"|"A tough, realistic and ultimately satisfying British police procedural not unlike those of Bill James, where the cops aren’t angels and the crooks aren’t completely bad. Good stuff"