Overview

"The combined soccer side of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Pegasus gained a tremendous following in its brief life. The team won the F.A. Amateur Cup in 1951 and 1953 before capacity crowds of 100,000 at Wembley. This autobiographical account, by one of the key players, brings vivid detail to the day-to-day reality of soccer management, team selection, training and modest celebration, together with the practicalities of daily life in the 1950s. Pegasus was the last of the great Amateur football teams and this fascinating, often humorous book, is a fitting tribute to it. This Second Edition features additional photographs and an Afterword by David Miller. Ken Shearwood, now in his late eighties, was an excellent all-round games player, and at soccer a frankly uncompromising centre half. who was to become an integral part of the briefly flowering Pegasus side from Oxford and Cambridge which, remarkably, twice won the Amateur Cup...After Shearwood retired from the game, he [taught] - not without considerable difficulty in the maths area - at Lancing, where he was to stay, as master, housemaster and registrar for the rest of his working life, serving under six headmasters. Pen pictures and anecdotes - shrewd, funny, sparkling, but never unkind - abound, for this is a contented man, happily married for over fifty years. That great Arsenal and England footballer Joe Mercer once introduced Ken Shearwood to Derek Dougan, the Irish International, as the ""best centre half in England""; even if he exaggerated, he may not have been too far from the truth. Colin Leach, Times Literary Supplement."

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9781849210478

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Reviews

'Pegasus took flight and everyone watched. The brief history of Pegasus, who folded in 1963, was related by one of their players, Ken Shearwood, in an engaging 1975 book that has now been republished with additions. At a greater distance in time their tale casts an even more affectionate light on the age in which they played and draws a starker contrast between then and now, when a footballer can spend thousands on a marble statue of himself without raising much more than an eyebrow.' David Lacey, The Guardian, 19 March 2011. 'The book should be on the national curriculum, to teach kids about a time when football was about so much more than WAGs, shirt sales, TV deals and wages. Worth it just for the picture on the front.' Corinthian Ideals, Leyton Orient match programme, 2011.

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