A BRADFORD-born TV soap scriptwriter-turned-author has turned back time in his latest football book.

Marvin Close, best known for writing and storylining hundreds of episodes of TV shows including Emmerdale, Coronation Street, Tracey Beaker and Doctors, has written ‘1923: Life in Football One Hundred Years Ago’.

The book is a look at the experiences of footballers and fans alike back in the days when players used to take the local buses to matches.

It also explores everything from the opening of Wembley Stadium and the only ever murder of a football league player, Tommy Ball, to tiny Nelson FC’s 4-2 friendly win over the mighty Real Madrid - and why so many ex-miners went on to play professional football.

Mr Close’s book also looks in depth at how players lived, trained and overcame the legacy of World War One, suffering as many of them did from war injuries and shell shock.

The Bradford City fan, who now lives in Hornsea, East Yorkshire, said: “The book is based on an exhaustive amount of archive material and scores of newspaper reports and articles from the time.

It was a joy to research as it threw up so many shocks and surprises, all of which feature in the book

“1923 proved to be a memorable year with Liverpool winning the league and of course, the chaos that was the White Horse FA Cup Final.

“But the book also looks at how football pools began, the popularity of cigarette cards, the matches, personalities and events that lit up the game; and how the media covered the sport way back then.

“It also explores how life was lived in 1923 – the food people ate; the type of houses they lived in; what they wore and did for entertainment.”

His love for football has led to him writing a number of highly-acclaimed books about the sport. For Harper Collins, he wrote ‘More Than Just A Game; Football v Apartheid’.

It was co-written with leading sports historian Professor Chuck Korr, which was a globally critically acclaimed exploration of how prisoners on Robben Island formed a football league of teams to help fight against the brutality of life there, which was translated into nine different language versions worldwide.

He is now working on a new book based around the 1953 Stanley Matthews FA Cup Final and England’s humiliating 6-3 loss to Hungary, and what both meant to the future of English football.

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