FOUR YEARS AGO, THE fortieth anniversary of the Munich air disaster saw the memories of that terrible February afternoon raked over afresh. Of the survivors, few have a better perspective than that of Harry Gregg, the Manchester United goalkeeper.

The Ulsterman helped to pull team-mates and passengers from the burning wreckage and his description of that day in his long overdue autobiography Harry’s Game (Mainstream, £15.99) written with BBC journalist Roger Anderson, still makes shocking reading. His detailed account is full of anger and bitterness because Gregg has been sickened by the way that events have been embroidered and fictionalised ever since.

Gregg is one who genuinely merits the tag “legend”, a goalkeeper who was brave to the point of recklessness in an era when a centre forward would simply shoulder-charge the keeper into the net. His playing career was littered with injuries, one of which led to him playing several games with a broken leg but he ushered in a modern approach to the role, commanding the penalty area as his own when his counterparts stayed on their line. Four months after Munich, he was voted goalkeeper of the tournament at the 1958 World Cup ahead of Lev Yashin.

Never one to avoid confrontation, Gregg points the finger at the United board, who treated the survivors so shoddily in the ensuing years, but drops his biggest bombshell by saying that players at Old Trafford were involved in throwing games in the early Sixties.

Harry’s Game is a powerful and riveting read, a book that deserves to be seen as more than the latest episode to roll off the Manchester United printing presses.

England’s Eastenders (Mainstream, £14.99) celebrates the extraordinary contribution made to football in this country by players from the London’s East End, and while it may well alienate Scots, Geordies and Scousers, Richard Lewis, an author, journalist and Leyton Orient fan, makes a fair case for regarding the area as the most fertile breeding ground for talent in the country.

Lewis’s big coup is to have been the first man to write about David Beckham as the local paper sports editor who accompanied the youngster to the Old Trafford tournament that launched him on his way. His local contacts also open doors to Bobby Moore and the Dagenham area that produced Alf Ramsey, Terry Venables, Ken Brown and the Allen family.

Roping in Laurie Cunningham stretches the geography to breaking point (though he did play for the Os) and Lewis might have made more of Cassettari’s, the café around the corner from Upton Park where the Academy’s finest football minds — Dave Sexton, Malcolm Allison, Frank O’Farrell, John Bond and Noel Cantwell — regularly shuffled salt and pepper pots in preparation for management.

That said, the story of Senrab, possibly the finest local boys’ club of all (Premiership graduates include Ledley King, Jermain Defoe, John Terry and Lee Bowyer), is a fascinating chapter that should perhaps have opened proceedings.