The Match

"A great hunk of a book which is definitely worth its weight in (blue and) gold... writer Piero Trellini sets the scene brilliantly to perhaps the biggest pitched battle of all time... [It features] 512 pages of education and excitement, including many great colour photos and informative, well-researched writing."

-- Mark Watkins * Football Book Reviews, Dare Radio *

"You may wonder how it is possible to equal the size of Moby Dick by writing about twenty-two men kicking a ball... Trellini took the trouble to analyze the whole analyzer about the protagonists of that challenge."

-- Giuseppe Culicchia * La Stampa *

"Trellini has transformed her sweet, very strong obsession in this volume that represents a football odyssey. I had never read, on a single game, anything so complete and engaging. In its genre: a masterpiece."

-- Darwin Pastorin * Huffington Post *

"The Match by Piero Trellini is an exceptional undertaking. Books like this are no longer made. It's a super-novel, has super-powers, the greatest is to revive the race with an unsustainable suspense as if we didn't know that Paolo Rossi would have made three goals. I recommend The Match to non-football fans. They will discover many things. About life and not just football."

-- Antonio D'Orrico * 7Corriere *

"Having read many hundreds of sports books over the years, I've genuinely never come across one like this... It truly is astonishing and makes you think that reading anything by Trellini on any subject under the sun would be almost as fascinating. I finished The Match truly blown away by the level of research and how Trellini then transformed so many random pieces of information and threads into such a readable and definitive work of art. In short, this is an utterly remarkable piece of work. To call it a sports book or to expect that it limits itself to 90 minutes of football - albeit 90 of the most memorable minutes of football ever played - would be doing it an enormous disservice. This is an homage to a bygone era, the most in-depth account of the before, during and after of any sporting occasion I've ever come across, written in a style that is so far removed from anything I've ever read before."

* On Magazine *

"Piero Trellini's The Match is a monumental recreation of his homeland's titanic win over Brazil at the 1982 World Cup in Spain. Originally published in Italy in 2019 to much acclaim, the book is a dazzling, dizzying mosaic of detail."

* When Saturday Comes *