Ron Reynolds: The Life of a 1950s Journeyman Footballer by Dave Bowler
Ron Reynolds was the Spurs goalkeeper for most of the 1950s. (He also played for Southampton and Aldershot in a career spanning twenty years and 291 League games.) He died on his 71st birthday (2nd June 1999), and upon clearing out his house his family discovered a meticulously kept archive of Reynolds professional career - cupboards, shoeboxes and carrier bags full of notebooks, programmes, ticket stubs, press cuttings, photographs, souvenirs from foreign tours, and Reynolds' own match reports of all his games. Taken as a whole, the collection offers a fascinating insight into the life of a professional footballer half a century ago. Dave Bowler (who conducted lengthy interviews with Reynolds for other book projects before he died) augments the visual material with a written account of Reynolds' life, featuring interviews with many of his contemporaries and also a few with whom he worked and who are still in the game today (Bobby Robson, Don Howe, Malcolm Allison). And Reynolds himself was quite a character - fastidious and outspoken he was a formidable PFA representative and was behind many of the perceived 'insurrections' of his more famous soul mate Danny Blanchflower, with whom he shared a passion for the glory of the game.