Our Authors
Graham McColl
Graham McColl is an experienced writer and journalist, based in Glasgow, where he lives with his wife Jackie and young son, Joseph.
He has been a regular contributor to The Times since 2003 and has written 11 books on football since 1995, including Celtic In Europe (Mainstream); United We Stand – The Oral History of Manchester United (Carlton) and, as co-author with Tommy Gemmell, Lion Heart: The Autobiography (Virgin Books).
Books by Graham McColl
78: How a Nation Lost the World Cup
A collision of circumstances made the 1978 World Cup the most significant ever for Scottish football.
It was a tournament that threw up a colourful cascade of characters and incident, unmatched before or since. A backdrop of hysterical Scottish nationalism added to the compelling nature of the drama.
Only Scotland could take a squad that was potentially the strongest in the tournament to a World Cup finals and appear to treat the experience with as much professionalism as a Sunday-morning pub-league team.
Typically Scotland to have a player expelled from the tournament for using banned stimulants, whilst another contributed a goal considered one of the greatest of that or any other World Cup.
Only Scotland, rich as a nation in history and achievement, could view a World Cup as the ultimate test of national self-worth only to turn inward in mass self-loathing when results went the wrong way.
Typically Scotland to have had a manager such as Ally MacLeod, the perfect master of ceremonies for a festival of Scotch-kitsch, and a kilted musical-hall shaman, Andy Cameron, performing a ditty on ‘Top of the Pops’ that brazenly promised Scotland would win the World Cup.
Well, we didn’t Mr Cameron. And this is how …
‘Written with the utmost tact and good humour, ‘78 is an enjoyable account of a painful episode’
The Scotsman
‘An enjoyably masochistic read that is full of pathos...this is worth the money for oldies, and also for young enthusiasts who need to be taught about the great perils of hubris’
Scotland on Sunday
‘Never again would Scotland be touted as potential World Cup winners, and this excellent book sheds new light on why it still haunts them 28 years later’
FourFourTwo
‘this breezy and enjoyable account of Scottish football’s equivalent of the Culloden massacre, with Ally cast in the role of the hopelessly misguided Bonnie Prince Charlie offers some plausible explantions as to why the 1978 team now has assumed a marketable kitsch value and inspire not a little misty-eyed reminsiscing among the less youthful followers of the national team’
When Saturday Comes
World Rights: Headline
My Story: Thirty Miles from Paradise
with Bobby Lennox
‘If I’d had Lennox in my team, I could have played forever. He was one of the best strikers I have ever seen.‘
Bobby Charlton
One of Britain’s greatest ever footballers, Bobby Lennox epitomises an era in which Celtic were the best and most successful football club in the UK. In May 1967, he and his fellow Lisbon Lions achieved footballing immortality when they lifted the European Cup—the first British side to do so.
Lennox’s 300 goals for Celtic and Scotland make him the second-highest goal scorer in Celtic’s history and the highest since the Second World War. With the Scottish national side, Lennox famously scored the second goal in Scotland’s stunning 3-2 victory over England at Wembley in 1967, when the Scots became the first country to defeat the then world champions.
In this definitive autobiography, Lennox recounts with his famous dry wit and openness his part in these extraordinary achievements and reveals aspects of his career which until now he has never previously made public.
World Rights: Headline