Keith Roe

Steve Tilson's back-to-back promotions with the same club, first as player, then as manager, are unprecedented in English football. With perfect timing, Southend United celebrated its centenary with the biggest prize in its history - the championship of League One (the old Third Division). But the preceding years have seen despair and well as triumph. Good times or bad, they are here in The Southend United Chronicles. Since 1906 the Blues have played some 5,000 matches. Every one, whether contested at home or in distant Plymouth, Swansea, Carlisle or Darlington, has been diligently covered by the sports reporter of the local newspaper - the Southend Standard and later the Echo. Nowadays, being a sports reporter is often considered the perfect job. It was not always so. Before the age of computers, floodlights, press lounges, all-seater stadia, motorways, comfortable trains and - dare one say it - the effects of a warmer climate - the job was rather less glamorous. The Southend United Chronicles relates hilarious and harrowing tales of correspondents perched on exposed, rickety gantries. Sodden or frozen by the elements, their gloved hands gripped pen and notebook while they peered through the gloom. No TV monitors assisted them with slow-motion replays. The act of writing risked missing a foul, a pass, a tackle - or a goal. And, inevitably, they often did. Yet these hardy reporters - who until the 1960s wrote under pen-names, their identities unknown - and their successors made this book possible. For 100 years, week in, week out, they brought us the story of Southend United - the players, the goals, the incidents, the humour.