New book from award-winning Trueman biographer Chris Waters among cricket highlights for the year ahead

CRICKET BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2014

The highlights of 2014's new crop of cricket books will surely include the second contribution to the chronicles of the game to be offered up by Chris Waters, whose debut work on Fred Trueman won numerous awards.

The Yorkshire Post journalist, whose authorised biography of Fred Trueman won both the MCC/Cricket Society and Wisden book of the year prizes, as well as best cricket book at the British Sports Book Awards, has turned his attention this time to Hedley Verity, another outstanding figure in Yorkshire's heritage of great bowlers.

10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat builds a life story of the Yorkshire and England left-arm spinner, who died in 1943 from wounds sustained on the battlefield in Sicily, around the extraordinary world record bowling analysis he achieved against Nottinghamshire at Yorkshire's home ground, Headingley, in July, 1932.  It will be published by Wisden in June.

Continuing the Yorkshire theme, Geoffrey Boycott is due to add more chapters to his own life story in September, when Simon & Schuster publish Corridor of Certainty, which is not his first work of autobiography but after a gap of 17 years includes much new material.

In that time Boycott received a suspended prison sentence for assault against a former girlfriend handed down by a French court and developed throat cancer, for which he was treated successfully.  As well as those topics, Boycott discusses his many interests beyond cricket and some of the friendships he forged, one of which led him to write a moving chapter on the late Brian Clough, his fellow Yorkshireman.

Of course, he has much to say about cricket, and there are forthright opinions on Kevin Pietersen and the England captain, Alastair Cook, among others.

Marking the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of war in 1914, The History Press catalogue includes The Final Over: The Cricketers of 1914, by Christopher Sandford, due out in August, while Wisden on The Great War: The lives of Cricket's Fallen, 1914-1918, by Andrew Renshaw, has a May publication date.

Also with a wartime flavour, Dan Waddell's Field of Shadows: The English Cricket Tour of Nazi Germany 1937 (Bantam, May) tells the story of how Felix Menzel, a cricket fanatic in a country where the game was regarded in some quarters as s symbol of decadence and privilege, assembled a team and somehow obtained permission from the repressive Nazi regime to invite an English team, the Gentlemen of Worcestershire, to play them on German soil.

Chris Arnot, who delivered a fine piece of cricket nostalgia in 2011 with Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, follows up with Britain's Lost Cricket Festivals (Aurum, May), in which he explores a non-corporate cricketing age in which the county circuit was illuminated by a series of festival weeks at traditional club grounds around the country, where spectators could enjoy the idyllic experience of watching some of the world's best players in some of the most picturesque and homely surroundings.

An intriguing title due to appear in July is Court and Bowled: Tales of Cricket and The Law (Wildy, Simmons and Hill), in which James Wilson explores instances where cricket or cricketers has been central to a legal action, building on the fact that the first recorded reference to a game called cricket (or 'creckett', as it was written) came in a court case in 1598, brought over a land ownership dispute in Guildford, Surrey.

No year of note in cricket literature would be complete without something from the elegantly astute Gideon Haigh, the Australian journalist widely regarded as the finest writer on the game currently plying his trade.  His observations on the the just-completed back-to-back series between England and Australia, entitled Ashes to Ashes (Simon & Schuster), is due in the shops this week.

Already out is 150 Years of Lancashire Cricket: 1864-2014, the official celebration of Lancashire cricket club's 150th anniversary written by the Rev Malcolm Lorimer, Graham Hardcastle, Paul Edwards and Andrew Searle (Max Books)

Also coming in 2014:

Playfair Cricket Annual 2014 (Headline) and Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2014 (John Wisden & Co), (both April 10), Lord's First Bicentenary, by Philip Barker (Amberley Publishing, May), A Majestic Innings: Writings on Cricket by C L R James (reissue; Aurum, June) and Batting for Berlin, by Andre Leslie (Finch Publishing, August).

For more information or to pre-order any of the titles, visit Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

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More chapters in the Lance Armstrong story and some different takes on the Tour de France

CYCLING BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2014

The boom in cycling books has been a feature of recent years in the sports books market, their popularity fuelled by a mix of success stories and shame.

On the one hand, the likes of Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish, Chris Froome and Chris Hoy have taken British cycling to a new level in terms of achievement on the road and track.

On the other, the doping revelations that engulfed seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong have placed cycling at the heart of a scandal unprecedented in the sporting world.

The Wiggins autobiography My Time was the biggest selling sports book of 2012, while the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2012 was Tyler Hamilton's The Secret Race, based on the Grand Jury evidence that exposed Armstrong as the biggest drug cheat of all time.

The Armstrong story spawned another William Hill contender last year in Seven Deadly Sins, in which journalist David Walsh's detailed his dogged pursuit of the truth, and will rumble on in 2014.

New York Times journalist Juliet Macur brings her perspective to the story in Cycle of Lies (William Collins), based on interviews with key players in the Armstrong drama and broadening the story to expose more corruption at all levels of cycling. Cycle of Lies is due out in March.

In May, Michael Barry, who supported Armstrong as part of the US Postal Team, describes his part in the scandal in Shadows on the Road (Faber & Faber).  Barry retired from professional cycling in 2012, shortly before testifying against Armstrong as part of the US Anti-Doping Agency investigation.

Barry accepted a six-month suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs while riding for US Postal, along with the stripping of all his results between May 2003 and July 2006.

In July, Emma O'Reilly, the Irish-born masseuse who became Armstrong's confidante and ultimately his whistle blower, will hit the book stands with Race to Truth (Bantam Press), in which she details not only what she saw as an insider in the Armstrong camp but the years of bullying and lies she endured as attempts were made to destroy her reputation and credibility.

The same month sees a reissued and updated version of A Clean Break (Bloomsbury), written by Christophe Bassons, the French rider driven to quit the sport after his stand against drugs led him to be shunned by fellow riders and confronted by Armstrong, who told him to leave the tour.

Also in July, Nicole Cooke, the Great Britain rider who in 2012 became the first to win Olympic and world road race titles in the same year, goes into print with The Breakaway (Simon & Schuster), which promises to continue where she left off in the damning speech she delivered when she retired in early 2013, when she attacked Armstrong, Hamilton and every other rider who owed their success to drugs for cheating legions of honest, clean competitors out of the glory and prizes that should have been theirs.

Thankfully, 2014 is not all about Lance Armstrong.  There are plenty of titles coming up that celebrate the more glorious aspects of competitive cycling and underline why the sport enjoys such enormous popularity.

Richard Moore, whose six cycling books so far include portraits of David Millar and Team Sky chief Dave Brailsford as well as the acclaimed Slaying The Badger, which focussed on the epic 1986 Tour de France, adds another in June when HarperSport published Étape: The Untold Stories of the Tour de France's Defining Stages, in which each chapter focuses on a single rider in a single stage that became a defining moment in the history of the world's greatest cycling race.

Armstrong's part in the history of the Tour cannot, of course, be airbrushed out, and such a book would be incomplete without the American's emotionally charged win in Limoges in 1995 or his dramatic, drug-fuelled victory eight years later at Luz Ardiden.  Moore revisits too Chris Boardman’s famous debut in 1994, Mark Cavendish’s best and worst stages, as well as iconic stages featuring giants of the sport: Eddy Merckx’s toughest Tour, Bernard Hinault’s journey through hell, Greg LeMond’s return from near-death, and the tragic Marco Pantani’s domination of the most controversial race in Tour history.

The Tour features elsewhere in Marguerite Lazell's updated Complete History of the Tour de France (Carlton Books), due out in April, as well as an updated Tour de France: The History, the Legends, the Riders, by Graeme Fife (Mainstream, September) and a fresh edition of Mapping Le Tour, by Ellis Bacon (Collins, May), a history illustrated with full page maps of the routes of all 100 races so far.

In April, Max Leonard looks at the Tour from a different angle in Lanterne Rouge: The Last Man in the Tour de France (Yellow Jersey), which tells the absurd and inspirational stories of the last placed riders in the Tour de France, from the former wearer of the yellow jersey who tasted life at the other end of the bunch, to the breakaway leader who stopped for a bottle wine and then cycled the wrong way, and the day the fastest finisher of all time, Mark Cavendish, became the slowest.

Yellow Jersey's catalogue also includes Geronimo! Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy, by Tim Moore, in which travel writer Moore, whose account of riding the Tour de France route, French Revolutions, won huge acclaim, retraces the tracks of the eight riders (from 81 starters) who managed to complete the 1914 Giro d'Italia, which has subsequently become recognised as the hardest bike race in history.  For good measure, he does so on a 100-year-old bike.

Alasdair Fotheringham, brother of the prolific William, follows up his biography of Federico Bahamontes (The Eagle of Toledo) with Reckless: The Life and Times of Luis Ocana (Bloomsbury, May). Ocana. who died in mysterious circumstances at the age of only 48, became Spain's second Tour de France winner in 1973, Bahamontes having been the first, in 1959.  Fotheringham doubles as cycling correspondent and Spain correspondent for The Independent.

Also from Bloomsbury, look out in March for Faster: The Obsession, Science and Luck Behind the World's Fastest Cyclists, in which Michael Hutchinson, the professional cyclist turned writer, explains how training, nutrition, psychology and many other factors play a part in the quest for speed, and for The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races, in which Peter Cossins tells the story of the five legendary races -- the so-called 'Monuments' -- that are the sport’s equivalent of golf’s majors or the grand slams in tennis. Milan–Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders, Paris­–Roubaix, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and the Tour of Lombardy.

Biographies to anticipate include Battle Scars (Hardie Grant), by the popular Australian rider Stuart O'Grady, and Chris Boardman's life story Triumphs and Turbulence (Ebury), due out in June.

Look for more information and details of how to pre-order any of these books at Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

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Biographer Patrick Barclay: 'I wish I'd been able to meet Herbert Chapman'

Given that the post-Christmas weeks are for good reason a quiet period in sports book publishing, the timing for the release of the first major biography of Herbert Chapman in the first week of January will have struck many as curious.

The January 6 publication date for Patrick Barclay's life of one of the great pioneers of English football was not a random choice, however.  It marked the 80th anniversary of Chapman's premature death, at the height of his powers, when a cold he had picked up during a trip home to his native South Yorkshire turned with frightening speed into pneumonia, to which he succumbed in scarcely more than 48 hours.

Chapman was not quite 56.   It was 1934 and he had since 1925 been the manager of Arsenal, having earned recognition in the game for winning the League title twice and the FA Cup with Huddersfield Town before being tempted by an offer from the Highbury hierarchy to double his salary. By the early 1930s, Chapman had transformed Arsenal.  Threatened with relegation and without a major trophy in their history when he took charge, the Gunners won the FA Cup in 1929-30, followed by the First Division championship in 1930-31 and again in 1932-33.

His death came on the day of a game, ironically against Sheffield United, the team he had favoured as he grew up. In a subdued atmosphere at Highbury, Arsenal were held to a 1-1 draw, although ultimately they were not diverted from their purpose and not only did they retain the title in 1933-34, they won it again the following year.

Chapman's successes set him apart, yet it was not so much the fact of his achievement as how it came about that was his legacy to the game.  He was the first to insist that the manager, rather than directors or committee men, should be in charge of selection, and the first to appreciate that teams might be better served by planning their tactics in advance.

With the encouragement of Charlie Buchan, whom he had signed from Sunderland, he honed the 'WM' formation, replacing the traditional 2-3-5 with 3-2-2-3, partially to counter a change in the offside law and partly to facilitate the counter-attacking style that Chapman effectively invented and which became Arsenal's hallmark.

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Writing in BACKPASS magazine, Barclay explained that his biographies of Sir Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourinho, both of which won critical acclaim, suffered from the continuing success of his subjects, which meant they were soon in need of revision and updating.

Barclay's literary agent, David Luxton, asked him if he would fancy taking on a third book, to which he replied: "Yes, as long as it is about a dead man.

"The story of Mourinho, especially, was compiled with research on his early life on one side of the desk and a growing pile of newspaper cuttings on the other," Barclay said. "The yearning was for a project less organic.  And yet the subject had to matter to a large number of people. Luxton -- bless him -- came up with the idea of Herbert Chapman."

Barclay found his research so rewarding, he confesses, that he began after a while to wish Chapman were not dead, so that he might meet him in person.

"I'm not being sentimental in saying that the writing soon lost any commercial motive and became a labour of love.  There were times when, after only my late mother, Chapman was the human being whose reincarnation I craved...a hopeless impulse to meet him born of a mixture of affection and curiosity."

The reviews include this appreciation from David Lister, writing in The Independent.

'Patrick Barclay, the Evening Standard’s football columnist, and football correspondent of The Independent in its early days, has approached the subject with a mixture of passion and assiduous research. He has the sportswriter’s unfailing tendency to crave the widest possible context (I’m not sure I need to know that when Chapman was a toddler in Sheffield, Billy the Kid and Jesse James were being shot in America) but when he applies the wider context to the evolution of football and to how the Britain of the time shaped the Chapman family, the results are extraordinarily rewarding. Barclay traces the first half century of the game so evocatively that one can almost believe he was at some of those early matches, and reminds us of the oddities of those days. I hadn’t realised that even as late as the 1927 Arsenal vs Cardiff Wembley cup final, the referee wore a bow-tie.

He is fascinating on football and the First World War, the Footballers’ Battalion (surely worth a book in itself) and the poignant last words of one fallen soldier to his comrade: “Goodbye, Mac. Best of luck, special love to my sweetheart Mary Jane and best regards to the lads at Orient.”

Such vignettes put this book above the normal sports biography. Barclay does indeed trace Chapman’s life from would-be mining engineer to footballer, then visionary manager with a penchant for plus-fours, at the same time an official in his church, a strange mixture of elitist and collectivist. He loved signing supreme talents but insisted no player be paid more than another. He improved life for the fans, modernising the Arsenal ground, and commissioning the famous art deco design for the stands, encouraging Jewish supporters and giving to Jewish charities. There remains an element of mystery as to what drove him (just as there does with today’s managers) but this book succeeds in being about more than Chapman. Barclay vividly and brilliantly conjures up a forgotten sporting age.'

The Life and Times of Herbert Chapman: The Story of One of Football's Most Influential Figures, by Patrick Barclay (W&N), can be purchased here from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

Chapman's own thoughts on the game, Chapman on Football, a collection of his columns from the Sunday Express, has been reprinted by GCR Books (available from Amazon and WHSmith) and in facsimile form by Robert Blatchford Publishing (Amazon, Waterstones, WHSmith).

To find out more about BACKPASS magazine, visit www.backpassmagazine.co.uk

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The Andrew Strauss take on England outcast Kevin Pietersen

The latest episode in the cricket soap opera surrounding Kevin Pietersen looks unlikely to bring any insights into life behind the scenes in the England cricket dressing room, even though the most talented and controversial England batsman of recent years looks to have jettisoned for good, with a great many secrets to take with him.

Andrew Strauss

Perhaps what England skipper Alastair Cook and ex-head coach Andy Flower really think about Pietersen brilliant but destructive career will be revealed in a book one day, when what appears to be a mutually agreed omertà among the parties involved can be put to one side.

In the meantime, here's some of what Cook's predecessor Andrew Strauss had to say about KP in his autobiography, Driving Ambition, published by Hodder and Stoughton in October last year, beginning with the call from Flower that marked the start of the 'textgate' saga that marred the last weeks of the former captain's career.

Strauss recalled the words of Flower's call, ahead of the third and final Test of the 2012 series against South Africa, at Lords: "Straussy, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I have received information that KP has sent some text messages to the South African players criticising you and perhaps even giving them information on how to get you out. A newspaper is apparently in possession of the texts and intends to print them."

He described himself as "dumbfounded" at what he felt was at the very least "talking out of school" on Pietersen's part but horrified at the notion he might suggest ways in which the South Africans might get him out.  If that were true, Strauss wrote, "that amounted to treachery and I would never forgive him."

The England captain believed it would be impossible to move on unless Pietersen at least apologised for sending the texts, if he could not deny them, as well as revealing what he had said. "He was alleged to have referred to me as a ‘doos’ — an Afrikaans word which means a ‘box’ but which in slang can have another more insulting meaning."

Strauss said he became "increasingly tired and exasperated" during the episode, in which he felt Pietersen was "more concerned with coming out of the saga in the best possible light than with doing the right thing by his team-mates."

"The nagging frustration I still have," he wrote, "is that all of that time, effort and commitment from our players over a three-year period to make our environment special and different were undermined in one episode."

Yet he was dismayed at the perception widely held that it was his relationship with Pietersen that lay behind the incident, insisting that until the second Test match of that series, at Headingley, the pair had never had a significant dispute. The root cause, Strauss believed, was Pietersen's long-standing resentment of the ECB over the way he was forced to resign as England captain in 2009 after he and former coach Peter Moores had fallen out.

"There is no doubt that the way his stint in charge of the England team ended was a significant assault on KP’s ego," Strauss wrote, adding that although Pietersen returned to the team and scored runs, using his batting "to settle his score with the ECB", there was bitterness below the surface.

"His loyalty to English cricket, and the ECB in particular, was severely affected. And the simmering resentment came to the surface during the summer of 2012.

"Kevin had been trying to secure more time for himself to play in the IPL after he had signed a contract with the Delhi Daredevils reputedly worth $2 million. The ECB were unwilling - rightly, in my opinion - to let any player either miss or not be properly prepared to play in a Test match in order to fulfil IPL obligations, and so an ugly stand-off ensued between Pietersen and the board, which was probably the backdrop to him suddenly retiring from ODI cricket shortly after the West Indies Test series."

Strauss said that he tried to stay out of the dispute for the most part, but described incidents in the lead-up to the Headingley Test that forced him to become more involved.

"On the practice days, he seemed completely withdrawn, as though he was consciously distancing himself from the team," Strauss wrote. "And on the first day of the game itself he seemed determined to let everyone in the ground know just how unhappy he was.  As captain, I could not let it go and I called him into a back room to make it clear his behaviour was unacceptable. I was shocked by his lack of contrition and his apparent hostility towards me. It felt as though he was trying to goad me into a confrontation. It was almost as if he was trying to engineer an excuse to turn his back on the team."

Strauss asked some of the senior players, specifically Cook, Jimmy Anderson and Matt Prior, to try to persuade Pietersen to change his attitude.  His response, of course, was to produce one of the greatest batting performances of his or any England batsman's career, destroying the world’s best bowling attack with a brilliant 149. "You can say what you want about Kevin Pietersen, but you can never doubt his immense ability," Strauss commented.

Any admiration for him dissolved, however, when Pietersen addressed the media later, intimating that he had played his last Test match and famously declaring that ‘It’s tough being me, playing for England’.

This Strauss took as "implying he was being treated badly by his team-mates in the dressing room."

"For me, he had crossed the line," he added. "He seemed to be at best destabilising and at worst undermining our carefully cultivated team environment."

Then came reconciliation.  In a meeting arranged by ECB management, Strauss described Pietersen as seeming "contrite about what had happened and...re-affirmed his willingness and commitment to come back into the fold."

But the emergence of the text messages story was the final straw for Strauss.  "Without the sudden appearance of those text messages - which had come to light a little too conveniently from a South African point of view for my liking -  the matter would have been well on the way to being solved. We could all have forgiven and forgotten."

Pietersen, of course, was allowed yet another chance, returning to the side after a period of re-integration. Strauss resigned from the captaincy at the end of the South Africa series, announcing simultaneously that he was retiring as a player from all forms of the game.

Buy Driving Ambition: My Autobiography from Amazon,  Waterstones or WHSmith.

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Headline promise hilarity from joker Jimmy Bullard's footballing memoirs

Headline have revealed the cover for Bend It Like Bullard, the in which Jimmy Bullard, the former Wigan, Fulham and Hull City midfielder who was forced into premature retirement because of persistent knee injuries, dispenses his own Twelve Pillars of Football Wisdom.

Bullard, 35, earned a reputation for playing practical jokes during his 13-year career in the professional game and Headline say his sense of humour shines through in Bend It Like Bullard.

"We are extremely excited to be publishing Jimmy's first book," Headline announce in the publicity accompanying the cover picture. "We've read it, and trust us, it's hilarious."

According to the publisher's blurb, Bend It Like Bullard is "a rip-roaring, life-enhancing, hilarious memoir from a football cult hero; very much in the same vein as recent bestsellers from Paul Merson and Jeff Stelling."

Bullard, who grew up in the East End of London, worked as a painter and decorator but, after being spotted playing for Gravesend and Northfleet, was determined enough to recover from rejection by his beloved West Ham to work his way up from the lower levels of league football with Peterborough before making a name for himself in the Premier League and three times being named in England squads.

"Having played under the likes of Barry Fry, Harry Redknapp and Phil Brown, appeared alongside names as diverse as Neil Ruddock and Paolo di Canio, and as long as Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, Jimmy has racked up an amazing collection of tales and pranks both on and off the football front-line," Headline's blurb continues. "Told with candour, Bend It Like Bullard is the extraordinary story of his journey from cable TV fitter to cult hero. It will make you smile, chuckle and, occasionally, ROFL."

Clearly with plenty to live up to after that kind of promise, Bend It Like Bullard is due to be published in May.

Pre-order from Amazon or Waterstones

More reading: Football books to look out for in 2014 - A Sports Bookshelf Guide

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New biography of England's World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore among a bumper crop of football books for 2014

FOOTBALL BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2014

In a World Cup year, it is no surprise that 2014 will bring a surge of football titles to bookstores and online retailers.

Among the highlights are new autobiographies from Trevor Brooking and Terry Venables, both published by Simon & Schuster, a biography for Yellow Jersey of England legend Bobby Moore by Matt Dickinson, the chief sports correspondent of The Times, and Fergie Rises (Aurum Press), in which Michael Grant, chief football writer of The Herald newspaper in Glasgow, studies the early years of Sir Alex Ferguson's managerial career at Aberdeen.

Bobby Moore collects the Jules Rimet Trophy
from The Queen at Wembley in 1966

Fans of Jose Mourinho will delight in an illustrated celebration of his career due to be published by Headline in time for next Christmas.  Before that, headlines will doubtless follow when a controversial book on the Chelsea manager written by Spanish journalist Diego Torres is published in English by HarperSport.

Prepare to Lose, as was its title in Spain, made the sensational claim that Mourinho broke down in tears when David Moyes was announced as Manchester United's new manager, having convinced himself that Sir Alex Ferguson would nominate him to take charge as his successor at OId Trafford.  The claim was dismissed as "completely false" by Mourinho's agent.

Ronald Reng, whose study of the life and death of the former Germany goalkeeper, Robert Enke, won William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 2012, returns with a revealing history for Simon & Schuster of the Bundesliga, from its difficult infancy in the post-War years to its status today among the world's biggest leagues.

A raft of titles timed to coincide with the World Cup finals in Brazil includes Futebol Nation (Penguin), a history of Brazil through the prism of football written by David Goldblatt, author of the acclaimed global football history, The Ball is Round.

Look out, too, for a revised and updated version of the Alex Bellos classic, Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life (Bloomsbury), and Golazo! (Quercus), a new book in which Uruguayan author Andreas Campomar examines how football shaped the development of Latin America in political, economic and cultural terms as well as in a purely sporting context.

There is no one figure, of course, more readily identifiable with football in Brazil than Pelé, whose thoughts on the game are passed on with the help of Brazil-based journalist Brian Winter in Why Soccer Matters (Penguin).

In Thirty-One Nil (Bloomsbury), the journalist James Montague describes what the World Cup means in some of the world's most remote football outposts, the nations right at the bottom of the football food chain, whose quest for a precious place in the finals begins long before the major players have even thought about their route to the top table.  The title commemorates the record scoreline in a World Cup qualification match, when Australia beat American Samoa by that score in April 2001.

And given that they are almost bound to play a part at some stage, Ben Lyttleton, who has written about European football for the Guardian and Sunday Telegraph among others, examines the art and psychology of penalty kicks in Twelve Yards (Bantam Press).

Jonathan Wilson

Later in the year, but with the potential to be perfectly timed depending on what happens in Brazil, Orion books will offer the latest from Jonathan Wilson, the acclaimed expert on the evolution of football tactics, who turns his eye to the history of football in Argentina in Angels With Dirty Faces.

Here is The Sports Bookshelf's month-by-month guide to a selection of other football books due to appear in 2014.

February

When Football Was Football: Swansea (by Neil Palmer) and Crystal Palace (by Tom Hopkinson), published by J Haynes & Co.

March

Brazil Futebol, by Keir Radnedge (Carlton); Sol Campbell: The Authorised Biography, by Simon Astaire (Spellbinding Media); Hillsborough Voices, by Kevin Sampson (Ebury Press).

April

So Good I Did It Twice - My Life From Left Field, by Kevin Sheedy (Trinity Mirror Sports Media); Danish Dynamite: The Story of Football's Greatest Cult Team, by Rob Smyth, Lars Eriksen and Mike Gibbons (Bloomsbury); The Hillsborough Disaster, by Mike Nicholson (Amberley); Roy Mac - Clough's Champion: My Autobiography, by Roy McFarland (Trinity Mirror Sports Media).

May

How to Enjoy The World Cup, by Chris England (Old Street Publishing); Scotland '74: A World Cup Story, by Richard Gordon (Black and White); Bend It Like Bullard, by Jimmy Bullard (Headline); The 10 Football Matches That Changed The World, by Jim Murphy (Biteback); The Team of '66: England's World Cup Winners, by Jim Morris (Amberley); Best, Pele and a Half-Time Bovril: A Nostalgic Look at Football in the 1970s, by Andrew Smart (John Blake). When Football Was Football: Leicester City (by Ralph Ellis) and Charlton Athletic (by Mick Walsh), both published by J Haynes & Co.

June/July

Eight World Cups, by George Vecsey (Henry Holt); Brazil's Dance With the Devil, by Dave Zirin (Haymarket); Inverting the Pyramid (Revised & Updated), by Jonathan Wilson (Orion); The Three Degrees, by Paul Rees (Constable); George Raynor, by Ashley Hine (The History Press); Pep Guardiola - the Philosophy That Changed the Game, by Violan Miguel Angel (Meyer & Meyer).

August

In Search of Duncan Ferguson, by Alan Pattullo (Mainstream); Looking for the Toffees: Everton in the Last Season of English Football, by Brian Viner (Simon & Schuster); The World of the Football Annual, by Ian Pearce (Constable); The Final Season, by Nigel McCrery (Random House).

September/October

The Book of Football Quotations, by Phil Shaw (Ebury Press); The Biography of Manchester City, by David Clayton (Vision Sports Publishing); Roy of the Rovers, by Giles Smith (Century); The Bhoys Who Went to War, by Paul Lunney (Black and White).

For more information, go to Amazon or Waterstones.

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