Books for Christmas: A Sports Bookshelf selection of gift idea for the sports fan

What can be recommended as a Christmas stocking filler from 2015's crop of sports books?

Given the whiff of corruption rising pungently from the upper echelons of athletics and football, this may not be a good Christmas to celebrate the glories of contemporary sport.  As an antidote to unwelcome scandals, there is always the memory of more innocent days to fall back on and this year there are several absorbing diversions.

Football romantics, particularly those with ties in Nottingham and Manchester, have a couple of gems to take them back.

Evocative of a wonderful moment in the history of the English game is I Believe In Miracles: The Remarkable Story of Brian Clough's European Cup-winning Team (Headline), a superb reconstruction by Daniel Taylor of the rise, in the late 1970s, of Nottingham Forest from Midland mediocrities to double European Cup winners under a manager of unconventional genius, Brian Clough.

Taylor's interviews with many of the principal characters vividly recreate the mood of the times and the extraordinary chemistry that developed between Clough, his assistant Peter Taylor and a group of players no one could have predicted would be capable of such high achievement.  Inevitably, given the wealth of Clough anecdotes passed on down the years, there are many familiar stories, yet by putting them in context Taylor has given them a new freshness and perspective. Buy from Amazon, Waterstones and WHSmith.

In Forever Boys: The Days of Citizens and Heroes (Wisden Sports Writing), veteran sports writer James Lawton tracks down members of the Manchester City team that shone fleetingly, but brilliantly, under the maverick management of Malcolm Allison in the late 1960s. The rich language that characterised Lawton's columns in The Independent adds an extra element to the pleasure of reliving a golden era that may have been eclipsed by the modern Manchester City but was infinitely more joyful. Buy from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith. Read more...

Heady days of more recent vintage are also reprised in Amy Lawrence's Invincible: Inside Arsenal's Unbeaten 2003-2004 Season(Penguin), in which the Observer football writer brilliantly captures the team dynamic behind the Gunners' unbeaten 2003-04 season. Buy from Amazon, Waterstones or http://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/invincible-inside-arsenals-unbeaten-2003-2004-season/9780241970492.

If the focus of those titles is too narrow, then there is a wonderfully illustrated celebration of what every young fan wished to find in his Christmas stocking compiled by Ian Preece and Doug Cheeseman entitled The Heyday Of The Football Annual (Constable). Buy from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

And it would be a cold heart that was not charmed by Bryony Hill's beautifully written and lovingly told story of the life of her groundbreaking husband, Jimmy -- now, sadly, stricken with Alzheimer's disease -- in My Gentleman Jim (Book Guild). Buy from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

Back in the present, Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager (Century), Michael Calvin's exploration of the physical and emotional extremes endured by the modern football manager, and The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football (Penguin), David Goldblatt's dissertation on the growth of the Premier League as a barometer of Britain's social, economic and cultural evolution, both make compelling reading.

Buy Living on the Volcano from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

Buy The Game of Our Lives from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

The Game of Our Lives was named William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2015 among a field that included Living on the Volcano and Simon Lister's excellent Fire in Babylon: How the West Indies Cricket Team Brought a People to its Feet (Yellow Jersey), which also set sport in a social context.
Lister specifically looks at how the West Indian cricket team of the 1970s, built around cavalier batsmen and fearsome fast bowlers, helped the Caribbean community in London to develop a collective identity and pride in their roots. Buy from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

Among other cricket books, Richard Tomlinson's Amazing Grace: The Man Who was W.G. (Little, Brown)-- published to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of W G Grace and the 150th anniversary of his first-class debut -- is written in an elegantly easy style and brings welcome perspective to a story prone to exaggeration.  Buy from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

The traditions of English cricket are celebrated meanwhile in the sumptuously expansive Summer's Crown: The Story of Cricket's County Championship (Fairfield Books), a magnificently illustrated and elegantly written history of the County Championship, by Stephen Chalke, a worthy winner of the Cricket Writers' Club Book of the Year award for 2015. Buy from Amazon or Waterstones.

Boxing gems include A Man's World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith (Simon & Schuster), in which Donald McRae describes how Emile Griffith, a black and secretly gay boxer in 1950s America, overcame colour prejudice and homophobia to become world champion, and Journeymen: The Other Side of the Boxing Business, in which Mark Turley offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of boxing's professional losers, who make a living out of stepping into the ring merely to be notches on the belt of up-and-coming stars.

Buy A Man's World from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

Buy Journeymen from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

Away from the mainstream, Speed Kings (Bantam) - another commended by the William Hill judges -- is a splendid read in which Andy Bull reveals how the eccentric members of America's gold-medal-winning 1932 Olympic bobsleigh team could have stepped from the pages of a Scott Fitzgerald novel. Buy from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

And Lizzy Hawker, Britain's five-times winner of the 100-mile Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, tells an inspirational tale in Runner: A Short Story about a Long Run (Aurum). Buy from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

Also recommended:  Richard Moore’s The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint Factory (Yellow Jersey), Raphael Honigstein's Das Reboot: How German Football Reinvented Itself and Conquered the World (Yellow Jersey), Eibar the Brave: The Extraordinary Rise of la Liga's Smallest Team (Pitch) by Euan McTear and Winner: My Racing Life, by AP McCoy (Orion).

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Donald McRae in running to be first writer to win William Hill Sports Book of the Year for third time as 2015 longlist is unveiled

Donald McRae, the Guardian writer who is one of only two authors to have won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award twice, is in contention to take sports writing's richest literary prize for a third time.

A Man's World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith (Simon & Schuster) is named on a longlist of 14 titles for the 2015 edition of the award, the winner of which will be revealed in November.

In A Man's World, McRae tells the story of the American boxer who became world champion in both welterweight and middleweight divisions during a 19-year career but was also gay at a time when homosexuality was a crime in all but one of the American states and still classified by the American Medical Association as a 'psychiatric disorder'.

McRae's ability to draw the reader into the story is particularly strong in his recounting of the rivalry between Griffith and Benny "Kid" Paret, the Cuban fighter against whom he battled for the world welterweight crown three times, winning once and losing once in 1961 but winning again in April of the following year when Paret used the Hispanic term for 'faggot' to insult Griffith at the weigh-in, then took such a hammering in the ring that he died in hospital 10 days later.

The South African-born McRae won the William Hill prize in 1996 with Dark Trade, the journey into the murky world of professional boxing that established him as a writer of note, and again in 2002 with In Black and White, about the friendship between Olympic champion Jesse Owens and another boxing world champion, Joe Louis, two black American icons who rose above poverty and racial divisions.

Also on the list is another boxing writer, Mark Turley, whose intriguing book, Journeymen: The Other Side of the Boxing Business (Pitch Publishing), is deservedly recognised.  Turley's subjects are not the headline-making winners but the considerable cast of fighters who make their living from losing, the men whose job is simply to be in the opposite corner to potential future stars, well paid but with no purpose other than to be beaten as latest box-office prospect sharpens his skills on the way to the top of the bill.

The longlist, which will be whittled down further before the shortlist is announced on October 27, has a strong football content, as is to be expected.

These include Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager (Century), which is based on a series of interviews conducted by award-winning journalist Michael Calvin, which reveal how even the fierce heat of the media spotlight does not always reveal the full, devastating effect of trying to handle the pressures of being the man in charge.

The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup (Simon & Schuster), by Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, makes the list, deservedly so after the fine work painstakingly carried out by the authors in exposing corruption at the highest level of football.

There is a place, too, for Fifty-Six: The Story of the Bradford Fire (Bloomsbury), in which survivor Martin Fletcher, who lost several family members in the Valley Parade inferno in 1985, not only recalls the horror of that May afternoon but raises many unanswered questions about what happened and why.

David Goldblatt, whose global history of football, The Ball is Round, won enormous acclaim when it was published in 2006, can expect to be in the running with The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football (Viking), in which the football writer and sociologist turns his analytical attention to the last two decades at home and how football has developed in time with the social, economic and political changes of the post-Thatcherite era.

A diverse field this year includes titles on cycling, bobsleigh, running, cricket and even chess.

Another Guardian regular, Andy Bull, makes the list with Speed Kings (Bantam Press), his the story of the disparate group of outsiders who formed the United States team that became bobsleigh champions at the 1932 Winter Olympics.

My Fight/Your Fight (Century) is the hard-hitting autobiography of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) champion Ronda Rousey, while A King in Hiding (Icon) tells the story of Fahim, an eight year old refugee who became a world chess champion after settling in his new home of Paris.

Runner: A Short Story About a Long Run (Aurum Press) is endurance athlete Lizzy Hawker's tale about the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, a grueling 8,600 metres of ascent and descent over 158 kilometres of the most challenging terrain, which the London-born runner has won an incredible five times.

Chess has rarely been in the public eye since the great rivalry between the Russian giants Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov in the 1980s and 90s and before that through the political symbolism attached to American Bobby Fischer's defeat of Russia's Boris Spassky to win the world championship in 1972.  It has caught the attention now through the story of Mohammad Fahim, a child refugee from Bangladesh who lived as an illegal immigrant in Paris yet despite all the barriers before him became world under-13 student chess champion.  A King in Hiding (Icon), translated from the French publication written by author Sophie le Callannec and chess coach Xavier Parmentier, tells Fahim's story.

Simon Lister does a fine job in Fire in Babylon (Yellow Jersey) of describing and understanding the dominance of the West Indies cricket team in the 1970s and 1980s and the effect it had on the people of the region, while Richard Moore delves into another great sporting passion of the Caribbean in The Bolt Supremacy: Inside the Jamaican Sprint Factory (Yellow Jersey).

In King's of the Road: A Journey into the Heart of British Cycling (Aurum Press), cycling journalist Robert Dineen delivers a personal take on the ups and downs in the history of British cycling, interviewing many of the most influential figures in the evolution of the sport in this country and interweaving his own experiences on the club cycling scene.

Finally, John Carlin, who has written some fine books about sport and politics in Spain and South Africa, makes the line-up with Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius, a superb account of the complexities and contradictions not only in the character of the champion paralympic athlete convicted of killing his girlfriend but in the South African nation.

The full William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2015 longlist is as follows:

• The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup, by Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert (Simon & Schuster) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• Speed Kings, by Andy Bull (Bantam Press) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager, by Michael Calvin (Century) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius, by John Carlin (Atlantic Books) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• Kings of the Road: A Journey into the Heart of British Cycling, by Robert Dineen (Aurum Press) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• A King in Hiding: How a Child Refugee Became a World Chess Champion, by Fahim, Sophie Le Callennec, Xavier Parmentier and Barbara Mellor (translator) (Icon) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• Fifty-Six: The Story of the Bradford Fire, by Martin Fletcher (Bloomsbury) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, by David Goldblatt (Viking) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• Runner: A Short Story About A Long Run, by Lizzy Hawker (Aurum Press) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• Fire in Babylon, by Simon Lister (Yellow Jersey) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith, by Donald McRae (Simon & Schuster) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• The Bolt Supremacy, by Richard Moore (Yellow Jersey) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• My Fight/Your Fight: The Official Ronda Rousey Autobiography, by Ronda Rousey and Maria Burns Ortiz (Century) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith
• Journeymen: The Other Side of the Boxing Business, by Mark Turley (Pitch) Buy from: Amazon  Waterstones  WHSmith

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Rugby star Gareth Thomas's autobiography Proud on longlist for 2014 William Hill Sports Book of the Year

The autobiography of Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas – the former captain of Wales and the British Lions and the highest-profile sportsman in the UK to come out as gay – is among 15 titles on the longlist for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2014.

Thomas’s book Proud, published last month, tells the full story of his struggle with his sexuality, which he kept from his now ex-wife Jemma and teammates through much of his career, and how several times he contemplated taking his own life before deciding to make his homosexuality public in 2009.

Biographies and autobiographies dominate the list, from which will be selected the 26th winner of the award, the most valuable and prestigious prize in sports literature.

Mike Tyson‘s no-holds-barred Undisputed Truth is among them, alongside Alone, the story of the tragically short life of John Curry, the figure skater who had 20 million Britons glued to their TV sets as he changed the perception of ice skating from marginal sport to high art, written by Bill Jones, author of The Ghost Runner, a wonderfully crafted book about the athlete John Tarrant, who became a sensation in the 1950s by gatecrashing races from which he was barred because expenses paid to him as a teenage boxer led to him being labelled as a ‘professional’ athlete.

Football life stories include Matt Dickinson’s Bobby Moore: The Man in Full and Stewart Taylor‘s Stuck in a Moment, the poignant story of Paul Vaessen, the former Arsenal striker who achieved fleeting fame on the back of one famous goal against Juventus in Turin but whose career was ended early by injury and who subsequently died as a drug addict.

Olympic gold-medallist Nicole Cooke, the first British cyclist to have been ranked World No.1, makes it with her autobiography The Breakaway, as does Paul Reese for The Three Degrees, the story of the West Bromwich Albion footballers Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson, who did so much to further the drive against racism in football.

The longlist in full (alphabetically by author’s surname):

The Breakaway: My Story, by Nicole Cooke (Simon & Schuster).
Bobby Moore: The Man in Full,  by Matt Dickinson (Yellow Jersey Press).
An American Caddie in St. Andrews: Growing Up, Girls and Looping on the Old Course, by Oliver Horovitz (Elliott & Thompson).
Played in London: Charting the Heritage of a City at Play, by Simon Inglis (English Heritage).
Alone: The Triumph and Tragedy of John Curry, by Bill Jones (Bloomsbury).
Run or Die: The Inspirational Memoir of the World's Greatest Ultra-Runner, by Kilian Jornet (Viking).
Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, by Anna Krien (Yellow Jersey Press).
In Search of Duncan Ferguson: The Life and Crimes of a Footballing Enigma, by Alan Pattullo (Mainstream Publishing).
The Incredible Adventures of the Unstoppable Keeper, by Lutz Pfannenstiel (Vision Sports Publishing Ltd).
The Three Degrees: The Men Who Changed British Football Forever, by Paul Rees (Constable).
Floodlights and Touchlines: A History of Spectator Sport, by Rob Steen (Bloomsbury).
Stuck in a Moment: The Ballad of Paul Vaessen, by Stewart Taylor (GCR Books).
Proud: My Autobiography, by Gareth Thomas (Ebury Press).
Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography, by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman (HarperSport).
Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon, by Elizabeth Wilson (Serpent’s Tail)

William Hill spokesman and co-founder of the Award, Graham Sharpe, said: “There is something for everyone on this year’s longlist; from the inspirational, surprising and sometimes troubling stories behind some of our best-known sporting stars, to masterful social history and the more unusual subjects of ultra-running and golf-caddying. This diverse range of topics is testament to the fact that sports-writing is in rude health.

“I am also very pleased to see that three of the 15 longlisted titles are written by women – a first for a William Hill longlist – though I’d like to see an even greater share of voice for female writers in the future”.

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award is the world's longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing prize. As well as a £25,000 cash prize, the winning author will receive a free £2,500 William Hill bet, a hand-bound copy of their book, and a day at the races.

The judging panel for this year’s Award consists of: retired professional footballer and former chairman of the Professional Footballer’s Association, Clarke Carlisle; broadcaster and writer John Inverdale; broadcaster Danny Kelly; award-winning journalist Hugh McIlvanney; and columnist and author, Alyson Rudd. Chairman of the judging panel is John Gaustad, co-creator of the Award and founder of the Sportspages bookshop.

The shortlist will be announced on October 24 October. The winner will be announced at an afternoon reception at BAFTA, in central London, on Thursday November 27.

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