It’s the sporting duffers’ equivalent of 50 Cent v Kanye West: Sir Beefy and Sir Bobby going head to head in the autobiography hit parade. If you call yourself a sports fan, it is your solemn duty to read both. But I just have, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Same blooming story: boy wonder from wrong side of tracks overcomes adversity to conquer world, has bad haircut, gets knighted, the end.

So which do you read? First into the ring, by a whole generation, is Bobby Charlton. His was an era when men were men, when sport was sport and when you could still maim a goal-keeper without getting sent off. People in his story have names such as Norma, Nobby and Tanner. There are coal mines, starvation and shilling-entrances to football matches. It’s pure nostalgia, like sitting on grandfather’s knee sucking a Werther’s Original as he says what it was like in his day. I found myself yearning to be a boy in the 1950s again, playing jacks on my knock-kneed way to Old Trafford. It doesn’t matter that I was born in the 1970s nowhere near Manchester. Or that I don’t know what jacks is.

The story itself has all the peaks and troughs of an epic sporting life: Charlton was one of the original Busby Babes, a team of unprecedented promise all but destroyed at the end of a Munich runway in 1958. Ten years later, he and his team had fought back to win the European Cup. It’s Boy’s Own stuff but there’s a problem – they left out England.

In a commercial decision that would have got right up Bobby’s nose in the old days, the publisher has split his story in half. These are the club years. Next October, we get the England years. So in this instalment, there’s no 1966 and all that. Just a blank, an unspoken “See volume two, available next year.” It’s infuriating.

No such problems with Sir Beefy. He has managed valiantly to squeeze his whole meteoric life into just 380 pages. We don’t have to wait to read about his epic 1981 Ashes. So he should win the battle of the books.

But not so fast. Beefy’s just not half as lovable as Bobby. It doesn’t matter how many times you say words to the effect of, “I know it sounds arrogant, but I was absolutely brilliant,” you’re still arrogant.

And then there’s the arguing. In the course of those 380 pages, Beefy just gets more and more worked up with the Establishment, the tabloids (or lizards as he calls them), his fellow cricketers, the police, little old grannies trying to cross the road. He was forced to spend much of his career battling allegations of affairs and drug abuse, as well as snooty cricket boards. But it’s as exhausting for the reader to be dragged through it now as it must have been for him then. And we didn’t deserve it.

Both books do their spine-tingling, sweaty-palmed bits well: when Bobby first scores at Old Trafford, and Beefy steps out at Trent Bridge, you find yourself wishing you’d tried a lot harder in PE. But it’s only fleeting.

Like a fumbled first kiss at a barn dance, the memory of Beefy’s achievements are best left in the rose-tinted recesses of your brain. For Bobby’s, I’d wait for the Eng-er-land sequel.

MY MANCHESTER UNITED YEARS by Bobby Charlton
Headline £20 pp400

HEAD ON by Ian Botham
Ebury £18.99 pp380

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