Jonathan Wilson is one of my favourite football writers. I’ve already enthused about his peerless history of football tactics Inverting the Pyramid, but he has written numerous other works, many of which grace my shelves. He has covered such topics as the history of Argentinian football, Hungarian football, football in Eastern Europe and the development of the role of the goalkeeper. If that’s your kind of thing (and it’s very much mine), he always provides a fascinating examination of his subject.

His latest offering, Two Brothers, focuses on the lives and careers of Bobby and Jackie Charlton. Pillars of England’s World Cup Win in 1966, and iconic figures in English – and, in Jack’s case, Irish – football for decades afterwards, it’s hardly an unfamiliar tale for readers of a certain age. Certainly, I already knew much of the story – Bobby surviving the Munich air crash, Jack’s unexpected arrival in the England team just a year prior to the fateful World Cup, for example – but Wilson also digs up a wealth of anecdotes as well as offering insightful analysis. The common perception of Bobby (the skilful one) and Jack (the more limited hard-man), is both accurate and highly deceptive. Long before Jack’s success and Bobby’s failure in management, the seeds of their respective futures had been sown. Jack, despite having a fraction of Bobby’s natural talent, had always shown an interest in tactics. If his Middlesbrough and Ireland teams were known for direct, unglamorous football, it wasn’t because that was all he knew: it was a response to the tools at his disposal in each case. Bobby, by comparison, didn’t necessarily fail in management because (as was supposed at the time) of a failure to deal with players who lacked his own skill level. Rather, Wilson argues, it was an outworking of his life-long disinterest in the tactical side of the game. Bobby, along with his great club manager and mentor Matt Busby, had always put the emphasis on picking the best players and letting them get on with it on the pitch. It wasn’t that Bobby’s players couldn’t do what he was asking them to do, it was that in comparison with Jack, he didn’t know what to ask of them.

It's not all football though. The book highlights the difficult relationship between the two brothers in later years, and the roots of the family schism that seems to have never been fully healed. It also offers a more nuanced look at their respective personalities than the usual “Jack is loud and plainspoken, Bobby quiet and sensitive”.

Two Brothers also offers a fascinating glimpse at football from a bygone age, a time before the Premier League and the lucrative money that came with it, when footballers were more embedded in the communities that they represented.

Wilson’s respect for both men shows through, although it’s hard to shift the perception that he has more affection for Jack. Perhaps that’s just a factor of Jack’s post-playing career offering more material for the second half of the book, or perhaps it’s that the young Jack seems such an irrepressible force of nature – stowing away in a bakery van and turning up 15 miles away at the age of four being just one example of why his mother said that ‘from the moment he was born, Jack was full of devilment.’ While the division between the two brothers seems never to have fully healed, their later years weren’t without affection. Jack appeared at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony in 2008 to present Bobby with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Wilson reports his speech:

‘When we were kids,’ Jack said, his voice thick with emotion, the tears glinting in Bobby’s eyes, ‘and we used to go to the park and play, I would go home for dinner and he would stay on and play. Bobby Charlton was the greatest player I’ve ever seen. He’s me brother.’

Two brothers, two personalities, two different skill-sets and philosophies – of football and of life – and two different routes to footballing greatness. It makes a great tale, and Wilson is the perfect man to tell it.