{"product_id":"forever-boys-book-james-lawton-9781472912404","title":"Forever Boys","description":"Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year 2015  Sometimes you love a football team not only for their strengths, the  splendour of their play and the appealing thrust of their character, but  also the haunting possibility that their best hopes may never be  fulfilled. This has rarely been demonstrated so vividly as by the  Manchester City team who briefly, but unforgettably, illuminated the  late sixties. And no one was more caught up in their struggles and their  triumphs than James Lawton, a young sportswriter starting out on a  career that would take him to all the great events of world sport. Yet  still, 50 years after Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison began to shape the  brilliant team, he counts watching their rise to glory as one of the  most exciting times of his professional life.  Francis Lee, Colin  Bell, Mike Summerbee - these players loomed large over the game as they  charged at the peaks of English football, and today evoke a period of  the sport's history that seems distant and unknowable, hard to see  except through the rose-tinted gloss of nostalgia.  Lawton goes  back to those heroes, interviewing all the main players and characters  who are still alive, and vividly brings to life the story of that City  team which with such wonderful panache, and freedom, won the first  division title, the FA Cup, the League Cup and the European Cup Winners  Cup between 1967 and 1970.  This, though, is not just the story of  one team, but a broader one of how sport can sometimes so perfectly  mirror the exaltation and the despair of the real world, how it carries  those who do it, and sometimes even those who merely see it, to moments  that will claim a permanent place in their hearts.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49566792057105,"sku":"GOR008439802","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49603791159569,"sku":"GOR007190725","price":11.69,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1472912403.jpg?v=1750923744","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/forever-boys-book-james-lawton-9781472912404","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}