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Competition

Published 19 August 2002

Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store

Competition No 3742

Set by John Crick on 29 July

Reading lists for football stars.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Oh, you liked this one. An hon mensh to Virginia Conran ("Mr Bounce by Roger Hargreaves for Michael Owen"). The winners get £20 each. David Silverman, the overall winner, also gets the Tesco vouchers for managing two stupendous entries. What have you all got against old Emile?

David Seaman

Catcher in the Rye (Useful hints on catching)

Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica and "De Motu Corporum" ("What goes up . . ." - handy tips on the behaviour of moving objects)

Cinderella (Someone else who had difficulty getting to the ball)

Rumpole of the Bailey (How to reach the bar)

Conflict Management in Organisational Development (How to move the goalposts)

Noddy in Toyland (In case any of the other books goes a little over David's head)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sections on the use of levitation in sport)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (How to arrange the wall)

The Boys from Brazil (General research)

Emile Heskey

The Tony Benn Diaries (Ideas on how to spend a lot of time and energy being ultimately totally ineffective as a left-winger)

Far from the Madding Crowd (That is, out on the wing as opposed to in the penalty area, where you might actually touch the ball)

Lady Chatterley's Lover (Showing that it is possible to score in any position, even when outclassed)

David Silverman

Emile Heskey

Roy Jenkins's biography of Winston Churchill (Concerning the ultimate futility of heroic imperial myths that create false expectations by a man who, even when played out of position, knew exactly how to cross from the left to the centre)

An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski (Emile falls down a lot, but, despite his angry pleas to the referee, is all too seldom convincing enough to win a free kick or a penalty. The master's wise words should help Emile to "live the part")

The Heavenly Arcana by Swedenborg (An apt title for England's tactics, and useful bench reading for a player who must constantly struggle to understand what the hell is going on in his manager's mind)

Basil Ransome-Davies

Martin Keown

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (For a veteran defender with time to kill. Martin will be consoled to learn that a degrading fall from glory is a historical, not uniquely English, fate)

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (Martin may have been a little bewildered by his manager's claim that Arsenal's high tally of red and yellow cards is not down to their ruthless fouling - just "all in the mind" of biased match officials. Foucault's discourse analysis proves that there is no objective "fair" or "unfair", only tendentious labels, which should reassure him.

Plastic Fantastic: a complete guide to safe plastic surgery by Dai Davies and Judi Sadgrove (Worth thinking about)

G M Davis

No 3745 Set by John O'Byrne

Lavinia Greenlaw (NS, 29 July) wrote about how "hell has lost its capital letter . . . [to] become the cipher for our worst earth- and ego-bound fears". We want compers' most fearful description of Hades.

Max 150 words by 30 August (to appear in issue dated 9 September) E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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