On 30th May 1984 Joe Fagan made football history – he became the first English manager to win the Treble. After just one season as coach he had led Liverpool to victory in the League Cup, the League Championship and finally the European Cup, beating AS Roma on home soil after a gripping penalty shootout. It was an unprecedented triumph, the culmination of a twenty-five year career at the very heart of the Liverpool machine, and the end of a golden age. Unassuming, down-to-earth, and never one to court publicity, little is known about Joe Fagan – a man who played a pivotal part in Liverpool’s domination of the game in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, but whose achievements were later obscured by disaster. A Scouser born and bred, he joined the Anfield coaching staff in 1958, after a playing career at Manchester City and years learning his craft in the lower leagues. At the time Liverpool were in the stranglehold of Second Division mediocrity – but then, a year later, Bill Shankly arrived, and everything changed. With a knack for nurturing the talents of precocious youngsters, Fagan quickly became part of Shankly’s trusted inner circle. Indeed, not only was Fagan one of the original members of the fabled Boot Room, he is widely credited with its creation. Under Bob Paisley Fagan was appointed second-in-command. So when Paisley stepped down, the reluctant Fagan was the obvious and only choice to succeed him – and what followed surpassed the dreams of even the most success-spoilt Kopites. However, just one year after Liverpool’s European triumph in Rome, the death of 39 fans at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels saw the club’s glittering record tarnished by tragedy, and English football exiled from Europe. Fagan announced his retirement just hours later – and stepped back into the anonymity he craved. Now, drawing for the first time on Joe Fagan’s own diaries, as well as a raft of new interviews with players, colleagues and contemporaries, this biography celebrates the record of one of football’s least celebrated greats, and reveals the inner workings of Liverpool’s golden age.

Now also a new documentary film written and presented by Peter Hooton, The Boot Room Boys - BT Sport April 2022. The Boot Room story starts in 1959 when Bill Shankly arrived and converted a 12 x 12 storage room into a meeting place for him and his coaches, a move that had momentous consequences, both for the Club and British football. Fans on the Kop will remember the heart-stopping extra time of the 1965 FA Cup Final, and the jubilation of winning the treble in 1984. But what was the common thread during Liverpool's glory years? It was the Boot Room. Lifelong Liverpool supporter and editor of legendary fanzine The End, Peter Hooton takes us back into that old storage room, where first Shankly, then in succession Paisley, Fagan and Dalglish drank tea, analysed, strategised, selected and deselected, and built the most successful British club in Europe in the 20th Century. Illustrated throughout with over 100 powerful never-before-seen images from the Mirror's forgotten archives, The Boot Room Boys captures the story, as it unfolded, of Liverpool's conquering heroes.

A New York Times Editors' Choice "[T]he stuff of great literature." —The New York Times | "Red or Dead is a winner." —The Washington Post The place where the swinging sixties started – Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles – wasn’t so swinging. Amid industrial blight and a bad economy, the port town’s shipping industry was going bust and there was widespread unemployment, with no assistance from a government tightening its belt. Even the Beatles moved to London. Into these hard times walked Bill Shankly, a former Scottish coal miner who took over the city’s perpetually last-place soccer team. He had a straightforward work ethic and a favorite song – a silly pop song done by a local band, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Soon he would have entire stadiums singing along, tens of thousands of people all dressed in the team color red . . . as Liverpool began to win . . . And soon, too, there was something else those thousands of people would chant as one: Shank-lee, Shank-lee . . . In Red or Dead, the acclaimed writer David Peace tells the stirring story of the real-life working-class hero who lifted the spirits of an entire city in turbulent times. But Red or Dead is more than a fictional biography of a real man, and more than a thrilling novel about sports. It is an epic novel that transcends those categories, until there’s nothing left to call it but – as many of the world’s leading newspapers already have – a masterpiece.

Many years have now passed since the greatest period of European dominance by any English football club came to an end. Between 1977 and 1984, Liverpool won the European Cup an unprecedented four times and established themselves as the number-one team in Europe. It was during the successful European Cup campaigns of 1981 and 1984 that the unlikely figure of Alan Kennedy came to dominate the headlines. Folk-hero left-back Alan Kennedy - nicknamed 'Barney Rubble' by fans after The Flintstones character due to his straightforward, no-frills approach to the game - scored the winning goal in the 1981 European Cup final against Real Madrid, as well as the nerve-twanging winning shoot-out penalty against AS Roma in 1984, a feat which secured his position in European football history. Kennedy's Way examines Kennedy's footballing career under manager Bob Paisley (and, later, under Joe Fagan) and provides a retrospective account of Liverpool's dominance during those years. Drawing on Kennedy's memories of the period, as well as those of other players and backroom staff involved with the Reds at that time, it is an irreverent, revealing account of the dressing-room culture at the club while it was at the height of its powers. The book concludes with reflections on Kennedy's post-playing life and on the trajectory of Liverpool since the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies, in 1985 and 1989 respectively, right up to recent events at the club, including the exit of Gérard Houllier and the team's dramatic return to the pinnacle of European club football under new manager Rafael Benítez.

Irish people have had a long and complex engagement with the lands and waters encompassing the Pacific world. As the European presence in the Pacific intensified from the late eighteenth century, the Irish entered this oceanic space as beachcombers, missionaries, traders, and colonizers. During the nineteenth century, economic distress in Ireland and rapid population growth on the Pacific Ocean's eastern and western shores set in motion large-scale migration that exerted a deep political, social, and economic impact across the Pacific. Malcolm Campbell examines the rich history of Irish experiences on land and at sea, offering new perspectives on migration and mobility in the Pacific world and of the Irish role in the establishment and maintenance of the British Empire. This volume investigates the extensive transnational connections that developed among Irish immigrants and their descendants across this vast and unique oceanic space, ties that illuminate how the Irish participated in the making of the Pacific world and how the Pacific world made them.

A keen observer of those about him, in The Water Ball David captures some of the flavor of the times and places in which he has lived, observed, and experienced life s realities: the good and evil that each person inevitably must face as they travel life s road