Bring Me the Sports Jacket of Arthur Montford

A Scotland on Sunday Sports Book of the Year

Take a hilarious romp through the best and worst of Scottish footballing history.

The Scot who won England the World Cup. Macaroon bars and Bovril. When Dixie Deans met Bob Marley. When Davie Robb met Olivia Newton-John. When George McCluskey met the Stones. When Rick Wakeman filed match reports for Meadowbank Thistle. Triumphs and disasters, submarines and rowing boats, War and Peace (who's read it). The Cowdenbeath kettle. The Brechin hedge. Morton's great Danes. Icarus at East Fife. The dead pigeon sketch and the amazing technicolor booze-coat. The can girls. Those who flogged ice cream and licked Hitler. The world's oldest conjoined twins. Inside the half-time scoreboards. Our greatest goal, our greatest assist, our keepers. Scarlett Johansson! And of course Arthur Montford - commentator, curator, favourite uncle to the nation.

In Bring Me the Sports Jacket of Arthur Montford, Aidan Smith mines Scottish football history for quirk, strangeness and charm. On a journey that takes him to Albania and also Albion Rovers, great players are celebrated and so are great characters. Rediscover old legends (not told this way before) and maybe learn about new ones. If there's a running theme it's that our game, its participants and those who watch in the rain are one and the same thing - indomitable.



Aidan Smith is the author of three previous books: Persevered, Heartfelt and Union Jock. He is a journalist with The Scotsman and a seven-times winner in the Scottish Press Awards.



'This survey of the strange, the sublime and the arcane in Scottish football history is funny, irreverent and vibrantly written'



'a terrific new book ... Aidan Smith looks back at football's magnificent 1970s'



'Those who have enjoyed Aidan Smith's Saturday interviews in the Scotsman will know he has a rare talent for drawing something more substantial than the usual anodyne guff from his subjects... the tone is playful, and Smith's wit is to the fore'