Keeper Of Dreams - Tapa blanda

One man's controversial story of life in the English Premiership - the tabloid truth about professional football. Cologne footballer Lars Leese experienced in real life what tens of thousands of amateur footballers can only dream of as they kick a ball about in parks on Sunday afternoons: someone appearing out of nowhere and making you a professional soccer-player. At the age of 20 Leese was still playing in the Westerwald District League (the third lowest of division of all German organised football), yet by 28 he'd abandoned his job as a computer software salesman and was helping Barnsley to their 1:0 Premiership victory over Liverpool FC. Leese spent three years in the world of professional football, to the fans' and indeed his own persistent astonishment - Frankfurter Rundschau referred to him as 'Mister Cinderella'. Through a series of interviews, Ronald Reng traces the stratospheric rise and equally rapid fall from grace of goalkeeper Lars Leese: the resulting narrative offers us an antidote to the average footballing biography and a unique - and at times shocking - outsider's view of the Premiership and life in England. Keeper of Dreams is brilliant mixture of footballing anecdote and intimate biography, not since you last read the back pages of the News of the World will you have seen such a an accurate picture of life as a Premiership footballer.

Ronald Reng has been based in London for the last five years as a freelance sports journalist. He has written about English football for, amongst others, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, and Zurich's Tagesanzeiger.