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).

Home

Tweet

Some entertainment for Christmas with a serious side in The A-Z of Football Hates

Review

Here are a couple of fun titles for the festive season, although neither deserves to be passed over as a mere Christmas frippery.

At first glance, The A-Z of Football Hates could easily be dismissed as such, as one of those easy-read gift items that book shops like to group around the pay point in the hope of tempting impulse buys.

In fact, while there is plenty of fun to be had in Richard Foster's eclectic collection of things that irritate him about the national game, the author dissects each by way of reasoned critique rather than unstructured rant or sepia-tinted rambling. The writing has a light touch and a sense of humour but there is research to back up the arguments, too.

The Definitive Guide to Everything that is Rotten in the Beautiful Game, to give the full subtitle, is as broad in its scope as you would hope for from something claiming to be definitive.

Subjects range from the trivial, such as haircuts, coloured boots and Mexican waves, to the rather more serious, such as the damage done by greedy agents and delusional owners and everything that is wrong about Qatar 2022.

The book is enhanced, too, by contributions from others, which means the author's is not the only voice heard.

These include broadcasters Ian Darke and Pat Nevin, journalist Matt Dickinson, St George's Park chairman David Sheepshanks, the sagely William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe and several supporters.

Nevin talks with personal insight about his hatred for ‘Hatred’, having seen plenty of it while growing up in Glasgow and playing on Merseyside.

If Foster's book is fun with a serious side, Little Bit Silverware (Haynes Publishing) is purely fun.  This is the 2013-14 season as told by the brilliant Twitter parody account @wengerknowsbest, which captures the Frenchman's vocal mannerisms with uncanny accuracy in observations that could almost belong to the man himself, even the most hilarious ones.  Hard to put down.

The A-Z of Football Hates: The Definitive Guide to Everything that is Rotten in the Beautiful Game, by Richard Foster, is published by Amberley Publishing.

Buy it here from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith

Buy Little Bit Silverware from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith

Home

Tweet

Sports Books for Christmas

Part Four -- Five from the Turf


Ruby: The Autobiography


Not unusually, Ruby Walsh is injured. The Irishman, winner of two Grand Nationals and two Cheltenham Gold Cups, has suffered 12 breaks or dislocations in his career. At different times, the occupational hazards associated with his sport have left him with an ankle, a leg, both hips, both shoulders, his left arm, both wrists, a collarbone and several vertebrae effectively in bits. For good measure, he had to have his spleen removed in 2008 after a horse kicked him in the stomach. At the moment, the tibia and fibula in his right leg are undergoing repairs. But Walsh is philosophical. He points out in this honest and revealing life story, co-written with Irish journalist Malachy Clerkin, that you can’t ride half-ton horses at 50kph and expect not to get injured. But he has also ridden more winners at the Cheltenham Festival than any other jockey in history.  He describes many of these, with fascinating insights into riding tactics, in an engaging autobiography.


McCoy: A Racing Post Celebration

Ruby Walsh might have achieved even more had his career not coincided with that of his great friend, Tony (“A P”) McCoy, the winner of a staggering 15 jockeys’ championships, and whose Grand National victory on Don’t Push It in 2010 enabled him to achieve one of the few targets that had proved elusive to him, having already won the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the Champion Hurdle, the Queen Mother Champion Chase and the King George VI Chase.  The Ulsterman is favourite to be named the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year Award -- never previously won by a jockey -- and the Racing Post has trawled its archives to celebrate his career, aided by the excellent Brough Scott, whose words both introduce the story and set the various reports in context.

Kauto Star & Denman

McCoy on Denman and Walsh on Kauto Star were both upstaged by Imperial Commander when the two met head-to-head for the 2010 Cheltenham Gold Cup in what was meant to be the ultimate turf showdown between two great jockeys on two brilliant horses. Nonetheless, despite this deviation from the intended script, Jonathan Powell’s story of this famous jump racing rivalry, which has been likened to Bjorn Borg’s epic struggle for tennis supremacy over John McEnroe and Seb Coe’s efforts to get the better of Steve Ovett on the athletics track, makes a strong contribution to the history of National Hunt racing.  Powell, who also helped Paul Nicholls -- trainer of both Denman and Kauto Star -- write an outstanding autobiography, Lucky Break, is a racing journalist of 40 years’ experience.

Frankincense and More: The Biography of Barry Hills


Robin Oakley may have made his journalistic name as the political correspondent of the BBC, where he occupied that position from 1992 to 2000 between John Cole and Andrew Marr, but he has a long-standing interest in horse racing and has written the Turf column for The Spectator magazine since 1994. His cleverly-titled biography of Barry Hills, who funded his establishment in a training yard at Lambourn in Berkshire with the proceeds of a gamble on Frankinsense in the 1968 Lincoln Handicap, charts the career of one of the sport‘s most enduring figures, describing the ups and downs of a career encompassing six decades and Hills’s 20-year battle with cancer.

Enemy Number One: The Secrets of the UK's Most Feared Professional Punter


Every horse racing fan at some point indulges thoughts of making a living off the backs of the bookmakers, exacting revenge on the gleeful retainers of incalculable losing bets and doing so not once but time and again.  Patrick Veitch, a former Cambridge University maths prodigy, has stung the bookies so many times there are virtually none left who are prepared knowingly to accept a bet from him.  Mind you, given that he has won more than £10 million in a mere eight years, it is hardly surprising that even the likes of William Hill and Ladbrokes tremble at the mention of his name.  In fact, he is still taking them to the cleaners, thanks to a network of agents employed to place his bets for him. His story reveals not so much his secrets as his incredible story, which involved being on the run for a year after a Cambridge gangster demanded a share of his winnings in exchange for not breaking his legs.


Click on the text or picture links to buy these titles.

For more Christmas Books visit The Sports Bookshelf Shop

Home

Tweet

Sports Books for Christmas

Part Three -- An Independent selection


If you are looking for gift ideas for a sports-loving reader in your life, don’t just take The Sports Bookshelf’s word for which titles are likely to be well received from the choices on offer this Christmas.

At this time of year, book suggestions make popular subject matter for newspaper columnists.  For instance, UK daily The Independent devoted a whole section to the best books for Christmas across a range of genres, with sport put in the spotlight by Chris Maume.


Maume is intrigued by the idea, advanced by Mathew Syed of The Times in Bounce: How Champions are Made (Fourth Estate) that high achievement in sport is less down to God-given talent than sheer hard work.  “See that David Beckham? That could have been me,” Maume muses. “I could have become the most famous footballer in the world – if I'd put in 10,000 hours of motivated, high-quality practice.”

He is also impressed with the ever-insightful Simon Barnes -- another Times man -- as he names the 50 sportsmen or women he has most admired in A Book of Heroes: Or a Sporting Half Century (Short Books), which Maume describes as “a romantic selection,” in which “most of the consensually feted postwar idols are there.”  But, he adds, not all are obvious choices.

“Tim Henman, for example, never reached the summit of his sport despite his best efforts. Barnes is also generous to the tainted: Ben Johnson's in there, and Flo-Jo.”

Among the cricket books that caught Maume’s eye are Blood, Sweat & Treason: Henry Olonga, My Story (VSP), which tells the story of what followed after Olonga and his Zimbabwe team-mate Andy Flower took their lives in their hands by donning black armbands during the 2003 Cricket World Cup to signify the death of democracy in their homeland.

“A story engagingly told,” Maume writes, going on to praise the “beautifully crafted” A Last English Summer (Quercus) in which Duncan Hamilton weaves his thoughts on the state of the game into a journey around an English season, while “writing with intense feeling for an age that's sliding away.”

Maume joins the chorus of applause for the unlikely William Hill Sports Book of the Year contender Blood Knots: Of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing (Atlantic) in which Luke Jennings, dance critic and novelist, constructs a memoir of his English middle-class childhood around an obsession with fishing and which Maume says rivals Hamilton’s work as “the best-written book of this year’s bunch”.


He also nominates Catrine Clay's Trautmann's Journey: From Hitler Youth to FA Cup Legend(Yellow Jersey Press) for “fleshing out beautifully” the story of the Manchester City goalkeeper famous for winning the FA Cup with a broken neck and hails Brian Moore's autobiography Beware of the Dog: Rugby's Hard Man Reveals All (Simon & Schuster) as a worthy winner of the William Hill award for being “a compelling read from the early revelations of child abuse onwards”.

Maume’s list concludes with We Were Young and Carefree (Yellow Jersey Press), the autobiography of Tour de France champion Laurent Fignon, who died of cancer in August at the age of 50, in which Fignon is “ruthlessly honest, about himself and about cycling, and provides a gripping insight into an unrelentingly hard world.”


Read the full article in The Independent.

To buy any of the titles listed, click on the pictorial or text links to purchase securely from Amazon.

For more sports books for Christmas, see The Sports Bookshelf selections for Football and Cricket or visit The Sports Bookshelf Shop.

Home Tweet

Sports Books for Christmas

Part Two -- A Quintet on Cricket


Between now and December 25th, The Sports Bookshelf will provide a regular selection of sports books that might tickle your fancy or interest a son, daughter, friend or partner as you weigh up what to put under the tree this Christmas.  Click on the title or the picture to buy securely from Amazon.

Thanks, Johnners: An Affectionate Tribute to a Broadcasting Legend


Brian Johnston died in 1994 but to scores of Test Match Special listeners it is his name that comes to mind at the mention of TMS, even now.  Jonathan Agnew salutes his unique place in the history of the BBC’s iconic cricket commentary show in a warm and witty homage to a man alongside whom he worked for only three years but whose informal, mischievous style made Agnew the broadcaster he is today.  Those three precious years also produced the most famous moment in TMS history when Agnew’s description of the way Ian Botham “didn’t quite get his leg over” as he was dismissed ‘hit-wicket’ reduced Johnners to uncontrollable giggles.  That incident alone gets a whole chapter.

A Last English Summer

Duncan Hamilton’s roaming diary of the 2009 cricket season in England has been shortlisted for William Hill Sports Book of the Year, an award the author has captured twice in the last three years.  Hamilton, a self-confessed sentimentalist, worries about the state of the game, the diminishment of its core values, the assaults on its integrity and in particular the damage he sees as being done by Twenty20.  Nonetheless, he finds much to celebrate in an evocative journey and the quality of his prose, rich with anecdote and brilliant observation, sets him apart among modern writers about cricket.

Start the Car: The World According to Bumble

If Duncan Hamilton would sooner share a swimming pool with a couple of hungry sharks than spend an evening watching Twenty20 cricket, David Lloyd is an unapologetic fan of the shortest form of the game. He doesn’t see it as proper cricket -- rather “a form of entertainment using cricket equipment” -- but does see it as a lifeline for the sport he loves, and laments England’s failure to see the potential of their own invention before others had stolen their thunder.  Bumble’s argument in favour is among the more serious bits of Start The Car, in which the many less serious bits are probably what made it the summer’s best selling cricket book.


W.G. Grace Ate My Pedalo: A Curious Cricket Compendium

Alan Tyers, irreverent columnist for the Wisden Cricketer Magazine, combines with illustrator and cartoonist Beach in a wonderful piece of spoofery, presenting stories with the full flavour of 2010 in the format and style of a Victorian periodical. Tyers lampoons anyone and everyone, sparing few of the game’s principal characters, historical or contemporary, in the funniest cricket book of the year, interspersing stories with headlines such as “WG Grace: My Pedalo Shame” and “Barmy Army Invades Prussia” with adverts for “Warne’s World Renowned Barnet Bazaar and Wiggery” and “Boycott’s Finest Sticks of Rhubarb”.


The Victory Tests: England v Australia 1945

Historian Mark Rowe delves into every available archive source to present a vivid picture of the 1945 Victory Test series, a confrontation between England and Australia that drew massive crowds eager to celebrate sport for sport’s sake after the years of conflict.  Because the Ashes were not at stake, the series has attracted less attention than it merits, given than England had a largely full strength side and the team of Australian servicemen included Lindsay Hassett and Keith Miller.  The result was a 2-2 draw, with the mostly unknown Aussies playing above themselves. Miller, the Royal Australian Air Force pilot, is acknowledged as a fine cricketer but Rowe controversially questions Miller’s reputation as a war hero.

To buy any of these titles from Amazon, simply click on the links.

Sports Books for Christmas: Part One - Five on Football

For more Sports Books for Christmas, visit The Sports Bookshelf Shop

Home Tweet