Fergie turning on the charm turns back the clock for BBC veteran Peter Slater

Given his reputation for taking no prisoners in his verbal exchanges with members of the press, journalists have been taken aback at how charming and patient Sir Alex Ferguson has become since announcing his retirement, particularly when he has been promoting his autobiography.

Yet it is a side to the former Manchester United manager that media professionals of a certain age remember well from the distant days in which Fergie was still trying to win friends as well as influence people.

In his own new book -- Don't You Know Who I Am? -- BBC broadcaster Peter Slater recalls the old Alex as hospitable, co-operative and as accommodating a manager as any with whom he might wish to seek an audience.

"My first contact came in the autumn of 1981," Slater writes. "I was sports editor of Radio Orwell in Ipswich, and Ipswich Town, the UEFA Cup holders, had been drawn to start their defence against Aberdeen, managed at that time by Alex.

"The first leg was at Portman Road and Ipswich had leant Aberdeen their team bus to take them to the training session on the morning of the game.  I planned to interview Ferguson after the session and arrived just in time to see the bus pulling out of the ground en route to the Belstead Brook Hotel where they were staying. I'd missed him.

"I followed that bus like a policeman tailing a getaway car and arrived at the hotel just in time to miss the staff and players making for their rooms.  What was I to do?  I had to have that interview but the manager had already gone upstairs.  So I asked reception to call him so I could put my request to him directly. He answered the phone in his room, and after I made my apologies for disturbing him I asked him to grant me the two or three minutes I needed to save my skin.  Fergie couldn't have been more polite and after a short while he came downstairs and gave me a perfect interview."

Slater goes on to recount Ferguson's hospitality ahead of the away leg in Aberdeen and their meeting five years later, on his debut as Manchester United manager, when he chatted for so long and so willingly with Slater's colleague Mike Ingham in a recorded interview that he almost had to intervene and wind them up for fear of missing his slot in Sports Report.

Slater admits, though, that he was to encounter the rough edge of Fergie's tongue years later and that United's blanket refusal to talk to the BBC at any level brought him down several notches in his estimation, hilariously recalling one moment when Ferguson, raging over a piece Radio 5Live had run about Ryan Giggs, told him: "It's nothing personal Peter, but you can still f*** off."

Slater, who has been broadcasting for an impressive 35 years now, is not short of a tale or two to tell, as you would imagine. His book, subtitled '35 Years Being Ignored by Sport's Rich and Famous' is packed with them, many from the world of motor racing that was the veteran BBC man's beat for a number of years, and a good deal from football.

Don't You Know Who I am?: 35 Years Being Ignored by Sport's Rich and Famous, by Peter Slater, is published by Vertical Editions.

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True life racing thriller Doped wins the 25th William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang has won the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for journalist Jamie Reid.

The saga of 1960s turf skullduggery, in which a crooked bookmaker and his glamorous mistress, plus miscellaneous  gangsters, bent stable lads and a drug supplier nicknamed 'the Witch Doctor', conspired to nobble high-profile racehorses, won the vote of the judges to clinch the 25th anniversary award from a field that included two other tales of cheating in sport from the worlds of cycling and cricket.

Seven Deadly Sins, in which journalist David Walsh recounts his pursuit of the disgraced Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, and Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy, which reveals many truths and destroys some myths about match-fixing in cricket, were both close contenders.

A six-strong shortlist also included the straight-talking and grittily honest football autobiography I Am Zlatan Ibrahomivic, the story of an heroic Olympic rowing eight, The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, and David Epstein's fascinating The Sports Gene.

But award judge and broadcaster John Inverdale, who revealed the winner at The Hospital Club in London's Covent Garden live on BBC Radio Four, explained that Doped had the edge.

"Sometimes it takes the panel five minutes and sometimes five hours and this year we were heading towards the upper end of that scale, but for a book that engages, fascinates and grips through to its climax, and is surely destined for either the big or the small screen, the winner is Doped," he said.

Financial Times columnist Reid, who received a cheque for £25,000 among other prizes, admitted that he had been, to a degree, sitting on the story of Britain's biggest and most audacious horse-nobbling racket since he was a small boy.

"I first heard about it, literally, at my grandmother's knee when I was about seven," he said. "She used to share the Sporting Life with me, introduced me to the magnificent, incomparable Peter O'Sullevan and she left me aware that there was a big story there that had never been fully told.

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"I've been a lifelong racing enthusiast and always loved the gambling side of racing and, I have to say, been attracted to this aura of skullduggery and chicanery that is part of that.

"Working as a journalist, writing other racing books and getting to know people in the bookmaking fraternity I gradually became aware that the story was more incredible than I could have imagined, this relationship between Bill (Roper, the bent bookmaker) and his lover, Micheline (Lugeon) and all the incredible cast of toffs and spivs that floated around them.  It was an absolute pleasure and a joy to write."

Reid revealed that there had been several approaches from film-makers gripped by Doped's thriller-like narrative about taking the drama to the screen, the latest of which had been received only on Tuesday of this week.

William Hill spokesman, and co-founder of the Award, Graham Sharpe, said:  “Jamie Reid’s brilliantly constructed book lures the reader into his masterly recreation of late 50s/early 60s England in which social class counted for far more than workplace competence. Nowhere more so than in the historically class-ridden world of horseracing. ‘Toffs’ ruled the roost in outwardly posh, yet archaic, stables and racecourse stewards’ rooms, but were constantly at financial and social war with cunning, street-wise, working-class ‘bookies’, who were tolerated only as outlets for personal wagers, the settling of which was frequently lax when losing.

“This background, generously scattered with sex and drugs and royalty, is the setting for a perfectly researched, paced and plotted unravelling of probably the most shocking, cynical, sustained attempt to dope – sometimes fatally – innocent racehorses and endanger jockeys for personal gain, to come to light in the 500 year history of the sport of Kings, Queens and commoners.”

The judging panel comprised Inverdale alongside broadcaster Danny Kelly, award-winning journalist Hugh McIlvanney and columnist and author, Alyson Rudd, under the supervision of the chairman of the panel, John Gaustad, co-creator of the award and founder of the Sportspages bookshop.

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang, by Jamie Reid, is published by Racing Post Books.

Read more about Jamie Reid's book

The full shortlist:

The Boys in the Boat: An Epic True-Life Journey to the Heart of Hitler's Berlin (Macmillan), is among six titles shortlisted for the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.  The others are:

Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong(Simon & Schuster), by David Walsh

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Penguin), the autobiography of the Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: A Journey to the Heart of Cricket's Underworld(Bloomsbury), by Ed Hawkins

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang (Racing Post Books), by Jamie Reid .

The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete (Yellow Jersey Press), by David Epstein.

More reading:

William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2013: The Longlist

Zlatan Ibrahimovic's bid to make history

Match fixing: cricket's heart of darkness

Lance Armstrong: one journalist's tireless quest for the truth 

The working-class rowers who stunned Hitler

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25 years on - can The Boys in the Boat echo first William Hill winner's 1989 triumph?

When the title of William Hill Sports Book of the Year was awarded for the first time back in 1989, the winning volume came not from the world of football or cricket or rugby or boxing or any of the sports we regard as mainstream, but from rowing.

It was a cracking story, though.  True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny, written by the Oxford coach, Dan Topolski, with the help of the author and journalist Patrick Robinson, described the extraordinary events that preceded the 1987 University Boat Race, when five US international rowers parachuted in to bolster a team soundly thrashed on the Thames the year before ultimately quit after a series of clashes with coach Topolski.

The 2013 winner will be named this evening, with the possibility that the 25th anniversary award of sport's oldest and richest literary prize will go to another rowing book.

The Boys in the Boat: An Epic True-Life Journey to the Heart of Hitler's Berlin, by Daniel James Brown, recounts another outstanding story from the water, this time from the 1936 Olympics, the showcase Games for Hitler's Nazi regime, when it was not only the black sprinter Jesse Owens putting the Fuhrer's nose out of joint.

Rowing was not only enormously popular with spectators and competitors in the post-Depression era but was expected to provide another measure of German physical superiority at the Berlin Games.  Indeed, five of the seven gold medals contested on the regatta course went to the home nation.

The exceptions were the men's double skulls, in which the German pair were pipped to gold by Britain's Jack Beresford and Dick Southwood, and the men's eights, which went the way of the American team, whose story is the subject of Brown's book.

They were the group of largely working-class boys from the University of Washington, who were too good for the wealthy young men from the elite eastern universities when they won the US championships on the Hudson River, watched by tens of thousands of spectators.

Brown finds a central character in Joe Rantz, a boy born into an impoverished family who had been obliged to live largely on his wits after his mother died when he was three and his father fled to Canada.   With the narrative skill of an adventure novelist, he tells the story of how he and his fellow crew-members battled against the odds and how Rantz in particular found an escape in the sport that was to be his metier. The movie rights have already been sold.

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Here are a couple of extracts from reviews of The Boys in the Boat, beginning with American writer Jay Parini's verdict in The Guardian...

"I've always admired Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, thereby infuriating Hitler, who stormed out of the stadium after this black man from Alabama so visibly challenged Nazi fantasies of racial superiority (at least as the usual story goes; there is now some doubt). So what if a group of brawny white boys from the University of Washington managed to win a gold medal in the eight-man boat race? Their feat – however impressive – will always seem less spectacular by contrast.

In the hands of Daniel James Brown, however, their story becomes a fine-grained portrait of the Depression era, with its economic and climatic horrors set against youthful dreams. Brown finds a representative figure in Joe Rantz, a poor boy whose determination to overcome odds make him an ideal hero. Brown learned the details of Rantz's brilliant rowing career from the athlete himself. But this story wasn't just about him; it was always about the boat: nine rangy boys – sons of farmers, fishermen, and loggers – who managed to coalesce into a rowing team that would march confidently into the 1936 Olympics under the hawkish eyes of Hitler, emerging victorious over rival crews from Germany and Italy."

Read the full review

On the rowing website row2K.com, Oli Rosenbladt says:

"Brown’s book is excellent in plotting Rantz’ progress in the context of the Great Depression, although even as Brown achieves an extraordinary historical level of detail, the prose veers into purple (or at least deeply indigo) territory at times.

As the book widens its’ scope from Joe Rantz to the wider world of Washington rowing, the (University of Washington) Huskies’ great rivalry with Cal-Berkeley, and the personalities that surround the Cal-Washington dynasties of the day, Brown is at his best. As a work of rowing history, the book is marvelously entertaining, and even the most jaded rowers and coaches will find nuggets of extraordinary value, both rowing and otherwise.

Brown is also very skillful with the personalities in the story, not only with Joe Rantz and his family and crew mates, but with his coaches, the talented freshman coach Thomas Bolles, the dour head coach Al Ulbrickson, his fiery counterpart at Cal, Ky Ebright, and a host of other great names and characters from the day.

Nominally on the fringes, but in reality deeply invested in nearly all of the proceedings is the British-born boat builder George Pocock. Part craftsman, part elite coach, and part mystic, Pocock is a fascinating character, and Brown has done the history of the sport a great service by not focusing on only one aspect of Pocock, either the boats or the sagacity of his advice to the Washington coaches and others, but shows us multiple examples of the “mystical meeting the practical,” if you will, of Pocock’s profound effect on those around.

It’s with the rowing itself that Brown does a tremendous job; it’s a sign of a writer’s job well done in his or her ability to create a thrill of excitement in the reader (as Brown did for this reviewer) over a long bygone event or rowing race."

Read the full review

The Boys in the Boat: An Epic True-Life Journey to the Heart of Hitler's Berlin (Macmillan), is among six titles shortlisted for the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.  The others are:

Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong(Simon & Schuster), by David Walsh

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Penguin), the autobiography of the Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: A Journey to the Heart of Cricket's Underworld(Bloomsbury), by Ed Hawkins

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang (Racing Post Books), by Jamie Reid .

The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete (Yellow Jersey Press), by David Epstein.

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year is the world's longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing award, carrying a £25,000 cash prize for the winning author.

The judging panel consists of 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 winner will be announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, at an evening reception at The Hospital Club in central London.

William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2013: The Longlist

Zlatan Ibrahimovic's bid to make history

The 1960s racehorse doping gang: a true-life thriller

Match fixing: cricket's heart of darkness

Lance Armstrong: one journalist's tireless quest for the truth 

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Under the spotlight - 10 matches that shaped the history of Liverpool Football Club

Jonathan Wilson's position as the pre-eminent thinking man's football writer is likely only to be reinforced by his latest offering, which applies the formula he employed so effectively in The Anatomy of England for the first time to the history of a club.

The Anatomy of Liverpool: A History in Ten Matches, which he has written in collaboration with another football writer, Guardian on-line's Liverpool-supporting Scott Murray, promises to be the first in a line of innovative club histories.

As with The Anatomy of England, this examination of Liverpool's evolution is constructed around 10 games the authors considered to have had particular significance, even if they are not always the most obvious or famous games.  The England book, for example, examined the 1966 World Cup through the prism of the quarter-final against Argentina, rather than the final.

"When I sat down with Scott over a meal to discuss which games we would include, we looked for a spread of games, not too close together if it was possible, that were outstanding or significant in their own right or that encapsulated a period in the history of the club," Wilson told The Sports Bookshelf.

"The game is the focal point for each chapter, in which we look at the details of the game itself and then spin off into the broader context.

"Hopefully it is a mix of the familiar with the less familiar."

The earliest match to come under the microscope is the concluding fixture of the 1898-99 season, away to Aston Villa, in which Liverpool needed to win to be champions of England for the first time.  They and Villa were level on points, but Villa won 5-0.  The most recent is the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul.

Matches selected in between include the the FA Cup final victory over Leeds in 1965, the defeat to Red Star Belgrade in the European Cup in 1973, and the 4-4 draw against Everton in an FA Cup replay in 1991 that preceded the shock announcement that Kenny Dalglish had resigned as manager.

"We chose the Red Star game because although Liverpool lost the first leg in Belgrade 2-1 they were optimistic about overturning the score in the home leg," Wilson said. "Instead they were played off the park at Anfield and again lost 2-1. It was the catalyst for a change in tactics and thinking that was to define the way Liverpool played in Europe from thereon in."

The unforgettably dramatic Merseyside derby of 1991 was picked not only because it was such an outstanding game but for what happened two days later, when Dalglish, who had willingly been the club's figurehead in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, admitted that the stress of the job had become too much for him.

"We decided not to do the Hillsborough semi-final itself," Wilson said. "We did not feel it was right to try to condense the disaster into just one chapter, but the Everton match enabled us to discuss the legacy of Hillsborough, particularly with regard to Dalglish and the effect the disaster and all the funerals that followed had on him.  Dalglish's exhaustion was the embodiment of what the club had gone through."

Researching the games presented its own challenges, although Wilson's resourcefulness and his contacts book enabled him to find video footage of all but the two earliest games.  Through a contact in Canada, he was able even to obtain a film of the first leg against Red Star, complete with Serbian commentary.

"It is surprising, too, how much there is on YouTube, even really old newsreel footage," he said. "And for the older games you can find newspaper reports that go into much greater detail in describing the action than today's match reports, largely because there was no film or tv pictures for anyone to watch."

The Anatomy of Liverpool is Jonathan Wilson's seventh book, his first written in collaboration with another author.

Wilson's study of football tactics through the years, Inverting The Pyramid, won Best Football Book at the 2009 British Sports Book Awards.  His backlist also includes books on football in Eastern Europe and his home-town, Sunderland, a full biography of Brian Clough and a history of the goalkeeper.

In the pipeline is a football history of Argentina and the next 'Anatomy', of which the subject will be Manchester United.

STOP PRESS:  Inverting the Pyramid is now available in an updated fifth-anniversary edition that includes an investigation of the modern-day Barcelona and how their style of play developed from Total Football, which itself was an evolution of the Scottish passing game invented by Queen's Park and taken on by Tottenham in the 1930s. It also analyses different styles in the early British game and the changing mentality of South American football in the 1970s, as well as looking at the birth of the 3-5-2 system so prevalent today.

The Anatomy of Liverpool: A History in Ten Matches, is published by Orion.

Also by Jonathan Wilson:

Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football

Sunderland: A Club Transformed

Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches

Brian Clough: Nobody Ever Says Thank You: The Biography

The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper

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After success of The Secret Race, will the Lance Armstrong factor again demand the judges' vote?

When Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyne won the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for their cycling drugs expose, The Secret Race, the judging panel's view was that the book's central role -- or, at least, the role of the evidence contained in it -- in bringing cheats to justice meant that it was almost impossible for it not to be their winner.

The same argument might be put forward for Seven Deadly Sins, the story of journalist David Walsh's 13-year pursuit of the disgraced multiple Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong, a piece of dogged investigative reporting unparalleled in sports journalism which could be said to be equally important in exposing the biggest doping conspiracy in sports history.

Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (Simon & Schuster) is among a shortlist of six titles from which the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year will be chosen, with the winner due to be announced on Wednesday November 27.

Author Walsh, the Sunday Times chief sports writer, has already been recognised for his role in uncovering the truth about Armstrong's wrongdoing with the prestigious Barclays Lifetime Achievement Award at the BT Sport Industry Awards earlier this year.

The 58-year-old Irishman has won numerous honours for journalism in the United Kingdom and in his own country since he began his career in the 1970s on the weekly Leitrim Observer in Carrick-on-Shannon.

A cycling fan, he started writing about the sport in 1984 during the period when the two Irish riders, Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche, were at their peak.   Over time he noted that rumours of drug use and blood doping in the sport were gathering pace and he was already working on stories about doping in professional cycling when Armstrong, whose return to competition after developing testicular cancer had given him heroic status in the sport, won his first Tour de France in 1999.

Walsh already had doubts about some of Armstrong's performances, particularly on the mountain stages, when the speed at which he climbed struck the writer as too good to be true.  On the day the American crossed the finish line in Paris, Walsh told his readers in the Sunday Times of his scepticism and suggested the result should be the subject of an inquiry.

The article marked the beginning of Walsh's quest for the truth and his pursuit of Armstrong, who was equally determined to avoid detection and did so successfully until the evidence of Hamilton and others led him to be found guilty as charged by the US Anti-Doping Agency in 2012, stripped of all seven of his Tour titles and banned from competitive cycling for life.

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It was a bitter fight.  Armstrong called Walsh "a little troll" and "the worst journalist in the world", obtained an out-of-court settlement from the Sunday Times after suing them for libel in 2004 and even, in the most heartless of all the insults, suggested that Walsh was conducting a vendetta against the sport driven by the loss of his son, John, who was killed while cycling home from a football match in 1995, aged only 12.

Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong is a compelling story, told so well that it is to be turned into a feature film directed by Stephen Frears, the English director known for High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen and Philomena among others.

The Irish actor Chris O'Dowd has been picked to portray Walsh, with the American Ben Foster in the Armstrong role. Lee Pace, Guillaume Canet and Jesse Piemons are also among the cast.

The following are extracts from a couple of reviews of the book, which has been a bestseller in several countries, beginning with the words of New Zealand Herald writer Dylan Cleaver:

"What shines through in this book, fired out in impressively quick time after the unravelling of Lance last year, is Walsh's doggedness, his ability to cultivate sources and his near-obsession with bringing down Armstrong.

Do not underestimate the machinery Armstrong had in place to prevent this sort of stuff seeing the light of day. You do not successfully live a lie for a decade without having powerful friends in powerful places.

At times it must have been so easy to fold - his paper, Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times, clearly thought about it - but the Irishman was made of sterner stuff.

He deserves the kudos coming his way, the royalties and, you'd think, a more relaxing year than the previous 13. Perhaps he'll have time to sit back and enjoy the work of others - though I wouldn't bet on it."

Read the full review

Saurabh Kumar Shahi, writing in the Sunday Indian, made reference at the start to the poignant memory of Walsh's tragic little boy.

"Somewhere in the middle of this 430- page exposé of Lance Armstrong, journalist David Walsh recounts the story of his son, John, who died when he was all of twelve. Never afraid of asking questions and never holding anything so sacrosanct as to believe in it unquestionably, John once had a tiff with his teacher at his school. In the Bible class, where the nativity story was being recounted, his teacher insisted how Joseph and Mary lived a modest life. Confused and intrigued in equal parts, Walsh’s son shot back, 'If they were so poor, what did they do with the gold they were given by the three wise men?' Heartbreaking as it might sound in retrospect, it tells us something about the Walsh family.

The Lance Armstrong saga can safely be adjudged as the biggest saga of triumph and eventual downfall in the history of sports in living memory. The story of a cyclist who fought and recovered from testicular cancer and went on to win a record seven Tour de France titles, and then followed it with a bestseller biography and a behemoth of a charitable organisation, appeared too good to be true to many. However, it needed immense courage to delve deeper. And one person who did that, David Walsh, the Irishman who works as the Sunday Times’ chief sports writer, found out that the going was tough. 'He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy,' he had commented in his measured understatement. In unearthing the truth, he did one heck of a job. And, Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit Of Lance Armstrong is the product of that perseverance."

Read the full review

Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong(Simon & Schuster) is among six titles shortlisted for the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.  The others are:

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Penguin), the autobiography of the Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: A Journey to the Heart of Cricket's Underworld(Bloomsbury), by Ed Hawkins

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang (Racing Post Books), by Jamie Reid .

The Boys in the Boat (Macmillan), by American author Daniel James Brown.

The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete (Yellow Jersey Press), by David Epstein.

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year -- this year to be awarded for the 25th time -- is the world's longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing award, carrying a £25,000 cash prize for the winning author.

The judging panel consists of 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 winner will be announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, at an evening reception at The Hospital Club in central London, on Wednesday 27th November.

William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2013: The Longlist

Zlatan Ibrahimovic's bid to make history

The 1960s racehorse doping gang: a true-life thriller

Match fixing: cricket's heart of darkness

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Corruption in cricket: an eye-opening journey into the game's heart of darkness

Given the substantial number of cricket books published each year, it would be unusual if none emerged as a candidate for William Hill Sports Book of the Year. For the 2013 award, the shortlist quite rightly includes the fine piece of investigative journalism that revealed the true nature of corruption in cricket, or at least took the reader closer to the truth than anything hitherto undertaken.

Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy (Bloomsbury) is written by Ed Hawkins, who has made his name for his knowledge of betting rather than batting or bowling, collecting awards year after year for his insightful analysis on the Betfair website.  His motivation in delving into the underworld of illegal bookmaking in India was not so much about uncovering corrupt cricketers as understanding how and why fixes happen.

His findings were startling, not least because they questioned whether the fix famously exposed by the News of the World that resulted in three Pakistan cricketers -- Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir -- going to jail, along with their paymaster, Mazher Majeed, was really a fix at all.

The following are extracts from a couple of reviews, first from John Crace in The Guardian.  In his role as Wisden's book reviewer, Crace made Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy his Wisden Cricket Book of the Year for 2013.

"After this tipoff [about the 2011 World Cup semi-final between India and Pakistan], Hawkins embarked on a one-man, heart-of-darkness exercise in investigative gonzo journalism to see what else he could uncover. He headed off to India and met a host of spivs, runners, fixers and Mr Bigs, who are referred to by their first names only. The evidence he actually discovered was damning on a circumstantial level, rather than conclusive proof. But that was neither here nor there, for the immense advantage Hawkins has over other writers who have tried to get to the bottom of match-fixing is that he understands the mathematical nuances of betting.

The big match-fixing scams, such as the Cronje affair and, allegedly, the 2011 World Cup semi-final, may be the easiest for the lay person to grasp. But what Hawkins shows is that, due to the phenomenal amount of money wagered at any one time on even the most insignificant televised match, a very small amount of information can nudge the odds firmly in the bookmakers' favour. It's all about probability. A bookie with the right algorithms can make a fortune in marginal, high-volume bets from information as simple as knowing who is going to win the toss, or player selection. Throw in the knowledge of a bent, bought player, and it's a licence to print money.

In the process, Hawkins also exposes the 2010 Pakistan spot-fixing scandal – for which the cricket authorities were quick to claim the moral high ground – as something of a show trial. The whole purpose of the no-ball scam was not to influence the betting, but merely to prove that Salman Butt, Mohammad Aamer and Mohammad Asif could be got at. Bookmakers follow betting patterns on a second-by-second basis: if anyone tried to place a bet on something as specific as a no-ball, it would be rejected as abnormal. Whatever else bookies may be, as Hawkins points out, they are not stupid. But others appear to be. The real importance of this book lies in its existence. Over the past 15 years, the cricket authorities have spent millions of pounds on various match-fixing investigations and have uncovered very little. Armed with what was almost certainly an extremely modest advance, Hawkins on his own has uncovered substantially more, in less time."

Read the full review

Reviewing for the ESPN Cricinfo website, Sharda Ugra wrote:

"Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy explains in clear terms, particularly for the non-punting type, the illegal betting mafia, its methods, its cast of characters and the force and weight of its finances. Indian cricket's financial strength is not merely centred around broadcasting deals and a cash-rich board. There is another rolling, surging revenue stream that oils the moving parts of the game's betting industry, both legal and illegal, and it is driven by Indian bookies and punters.

Full of incident and detail, the book shows us that far from being a shady cloak-and-dagger business, cricket betting in India is run by a well-organised network of around 100,000 bookies who operate on cash transactions through trust. Bets can be placed on four "markets" essentially: overall match odds; the lambi (the innings-runs market, where punters are given a spread of innings runs that they can bet under or over); brackets (or sessions betting around the scoring of runs over ten-over chunks); and the "lunch favourite", which are Test match lunch scores or innings-breaks scores in ODIs. The punter and the bookie are constantly in a tussle with each other over any extra piece of information pertaining to weather, injury, and team composition.

Perhaps the most fascinating detail in the book is the manner in which Indian bookie can exert influence by "moving" or manipulating the odds, even on legitimate betting websites. A single text message from a bookie to his customers has the market load itself with Indian gambling money, and can turn the odds the way the bookie wants. Hawkins writes, 'At the click of [his] fingers, the Indian bookmaker dictates to the rest of the world. It is not a delicate alchemy. It is not done through smoke and mirrors. It is sheer weight of money. A controlled landslide.' "

Read the full review

Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: A Journey to the Heart of Cricket's Underworld (Bloomsbury), by Ed Hawkins is among six titles shortlisted for the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.  The others are:

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Penguin), the autobiography of the Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (Simon & Schuster), by Sunday Times journalist David Walsh.

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang (Racing Post Books), by Jamie Reid .

The Boys in the Boat (Macmillan), by American author Daniel James Brown.

The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete (Yellow Jersey Press), by David Epstein.

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year -- this year to be awarded for the 25th time -- is the world's longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing award, carrying a £25,000 cash prize for the winning author.

The judging panel consists of 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 winner will be announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, at an evening reception at The Hospital Club in central London, on Wednesday 27th November.

William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2013: The Longlist

Zlatan Ibrahimovic's bid to make history

The 1960s racehorse doping gang: a true-life thriller

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Racy true-life thriller bidding to get the judges' nod as William Hill Sports Book of the Year

Horse racing, which has provided the subject matter for only one winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year so far, has a strong candidate this year in Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang.

Written by journalist Jamie Reid, the story of the biggest horse-nobbling racket in the history of the sport in Britain would emulate the 2001 success of Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand's wonderful story of the colt with famously crooked legs that became an equine hero in post-Depression America, should the judges take a fancy to it.

Steeped in underworld menace, with a cast of characters that could have been born in the imagination of a thriller writer, Doped rattles along at such an unputdownable pace that it would be no surprise were it to follow Seabiscuit on to the big screen.

In essence, it is the tale of a conspiracy involving a crooked bookmaker, Bill Roper, his glamorous mistress, various gangsters, bent stable lads and a drug supplier nicknamed 'the Witch Doctor' to nobble high-profile racehorses upon which the plot's mastermind and his accomplices could accept thousands of pounds in bets in the sure knowledge that they could not win.

A Derby favourite and several Royal horses were among the gang's victims in the three years before they were rumbled.

Here are extracts from a couple of reviews, beginning with Simon Redfern, in the Independent on Sunday, who sets the scene thus:

"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies famously remarked at the Old Bailey on 23 July 1963 when told that Lord Astor denied having sex with her. On the same day, an attractive 26-year-old Swiss woman, Micheline Lugeon, also appeared in court, at Brighton, charged with conspiring to dope racehorses.

Lugeon was the mistress of Bill Roper, a well-connected gambler and bookmaker some 30 years her senior. Starting in 1959, he had been doping horses, mainly to lose, on an industrial scale, and his lover had been an integral part of the scam.

Dressed to impress, she would arrive unannounced at a racing stable in a chauffeur-driven car, explaining that she was a French owner looking to place some horses in England; would it be possible to have a tour of the premises? Her wish was usually granted, and as she strolled round she was followed by her "chauffeur" – in reality Roper or, if he feared he would be recognised, an accomplice – who took a careful note of the boxes in which potential targets were stabled."

Read the full review

And these words are taken from Dave Ord's appraisal on the Sporting Life website:

"Reid does a wonderful job in profiling the central characters, Bill 'Mr Racing' Roper and his lover Micheline Lugeon whose charms allowed the gang to access the most powerful yards in the land. Charlie Mitchell was a fearsome individual with links to the Kray twins and is a growing presence throughout the story. Then there are the former stable lads who administered the substances which were provided by Teddy Smith - the self-proclaimed 'Witch Doctor'. The story of how a drunken afternoon of his at Brighton races hastened their downfall is a remarkable read.

This is a fascinating book, very well written. I was a huge fan of similar tomes Ringers And Rascals, by the incomparable David Ashforth, and Racing In The Dock, Richard Griffiths' gripping account of the scandal that hit the sport in the 1990s with Dermot Browne among that particular cast of rogues.

It says much about the quality of Doped that it is a book that sits comfortably alongside both."

Read the full review

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang, by Jamie Reid (Racing Post Books) is among six titles shortlisted for the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.  The others are:

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Penguin), the autobiography of the Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (Simon & Schuster), by Sunday Times journalist David Walsh.

The Boys in the Boat: An Epic True-Life Journey to the Heart of Hitler's Berlin (Macmillan), by American author Daniel James Brown.

The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete (Yellow Jersey Press), by David Epstein.

Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: A Journey to the Heart of Cricket's Underworld (Bloomsbury), by Ed Hawkins.

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year -- this year to be awarded for the 25th time -- is the world's longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing award, carrying a £25,000 cash prize for the winning author.

The judging panel consists of 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 winner will be announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, at an evening reception at The Hospital Club in central London, on Wednesday 27th November.

William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2013: The Longlist

Zlatan Ibrahimovic's bid to make history

Home

Tweet