The books started from something and nothing. I was writing for the Crewe Alex fanzine ‘Super Dario Land’, and someone asked me to find the origins of the ‘Alexandra’ bit in the football club’s name.
I went to Crewe Library and started leafing through Crewe Chronicles and Crewe Guardians from the mid 1870s and stumbled across the match report for the first ever match. I transcribed it. Still looking I found another match report and transcribed that. Before I knew what I was doing, I was spending two days a month, from 9 in the morning ‘til 7 in the evening, wading through the local papers extracting the match facts from the match reports. Obsessive…I have to admit that there were times when the thought that I might be turning into an obsessive-compulsive, or just a plain saddo, made me wonder what I was playing at; but my better half always persuaded me to carry on with a “you’ve come this far, you can’t give up now”.  | | Their biggest fan! |
I’d only really ever intended to keep it as a sort of information database but when, some four years later, I went to Tony Brown, then of the Association of Football Statisticians, telling him what I was doing, and asking for a few end of season tables, he offered to publish it all as a history of the club. I then also wrote a 7,500 word history; bought a few photos off the Sentinel; Tony threw in a player list; and, at the beginning of the 1997/98 season we had a book on the shelves at the Crewe Alexandra club shop, ‘Sports Pages’ stores in Manchester and London, the ‘Soccer Shop’ and Ottakar’s. 'Crewe Alexandra – Match by Match’ was born. Success!The first print of 900 sold out by the end of that season and before the start of the following season we had a reprint of 700, with the 1997/98 season and the WWII seasons added.
They are all gone now … and surely are collectors’ items? But history doesn’t stop. I decided at the end of last season that it was about time that I brought it up to date. The update, ‘Crewe Alexandra – Match by Match: A New Century’, covers the stuff that’s not in the first print of the first book (i.e. the WWII years and the 1997/98 season), all the seasons since the last print, and so much more. There’s a biography of the man who was instrumental in the formation of Crewe Alexandra FC, there are double page spreads of weird and wonderful statistics and an up-to-date player list as well as a biography of the author of this inspired work. This 80 page epic too has made it, like its predecessor, to the bookshops.
It is available in the Crewe Alex club shop at Gresty Road, at Ottakar's, and on eBay for the paltry sum of £4.50. If you buy it, I won’t feel so alone… | 
