This is the follow-up to his much admired How To Be A Footballer. It is terrific stuff; full of good jokes and observations about his fellow professionals — 'As a young player you just go [on holiday] where the footballers two years older than you are going, which in my case was Tenerife and Ayia Napa . . . I wanted to go to neither, which mattered less than the fact that everyone else was going . . . ' — as well as about injuries, warming the bench as a substitute, tattoos, cars and much more. He's even got some canny thoughts on the All Blacks.
You can dip into this book anywhere and will find delights: all football fans aged from nine to 90 will love it.
Reviewers hail Crouch as “a comedy genius”. And certainly, while the recently retired, aerially threatening, always-prolific, maritally punching-well-above-his-weight, leggy veteran is refreshingly self-deprecating, I reckon a big shout-out is due to his ghost writer, the BBC’s chief sports writer Tom Fordyce: he is a seriously talented writer.
His two books are a mix of humour and amateur anthropology of the Premier League. Po-faced as this sounds, I was left wishing for less of the former and more of the latter. Nonetheless, both intentionally and unintentionally, his books help explain the spectacular banality of modern footballers’ culture... Crouch had one book in him and it was his first, How to be a Footballer, in which he uses his best material and his cheer is usually cheering. The sequel, I, Robot, hardly even attempts to fulfil its opening promise to show “the truth behind the puff and the magic behind the curtain”.
