Heads Up: My Life Story

Alan Smith is a true icon of modern British football.

In his first season at Leicester, he scored 13 goals (playing up front with Gary Lineker), which helped the club win promotion to the former First Division. After five seasons and 84 goals in over two hundred appearances, he was transferred to Arsenal where he spent eight years and won two League titles, the FA Cup, the Football League Cup and the European Winners' Cup. At Arsenal, Smith became one of the league's top target men, with a remarkable ability to retain the ball and execute the perfect pass. For four consecutive seasons, Smith was the club's top scorer, winning the Golden Boot in 1988-89 and 1990-91. But it was his solitary goal against Parma in the 1994 European Winners' Cup final that elevated Smith to hero-like status at the club.

Written by Alan Smith himself - he was a columnist for the Daily Telegraph for twenty years - Heads Up is the honest and unflinching memoir of one of the country's greatest strikers. The book reveals the game from a player's perspective: on managers and referees; tactics and booze-ups; dressing rooms and away fans; on what it takes to be a top striker and what really happens on the pitch. It also examines just how the game changed from the stalwart professionalism of the old First Division to the globalisation of the Premier League.

Heads Up is Alan Smith's career on and off the pitch, in his own words.