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Listening to Big Dunc for 11 hours whilst on a Greek holiday was not ideal – it’s not exactly a beach read or indeed a listen given his monotonous delivery. Anyway, what about the content? You cannot question Dunc’s passion for the club and the city, nor his honesty about his frequently misfiring life and career, and of course there will always be enough in such an account to interest the average Evertonian. This is a book of two halves. The first – Dunc as player – I found hard going. He spends a lot of the time feeling sorry for himself, blaming others for his misfortunes and falling out with pretty much everyone, (including every manager and member of his own family (hasn’t spoken to his sister in 20 years and didn’t speak to his parents in 10), Although Dunc was undoubtedly stitched up over the headbutt incident that ended up in a prison sentence, by then he had an extensive off-field record of violence and misconduct (none of which was ‘really’ his fault). His Huyton posse turned out to be some of the major criminal drugs gang in Liverpool (which he didn’t realise until afterwards). Duncg undoubtedly has a big heart and generous nature, but his desire to be seen as a ‘big man’ is at the root of much that went wrong. Setting aside character assessment, the problem with this part of the book is that you don’t learn a great deal about the teams he played in and the players he played alongside. It is overwhelmingly about him, though of course there is the occasional interesting observation about the likes of Alan Shearer or Neville Southall but they are largely passing references. This changes in the second half of the book – Dunc as coach/manager, but I’ll leave that for another post.