Bookie prize contender Tyler Hamilton reveals all you need to know about the Lance Armstrong scandal and cycling's doping secrets

REVIEW: THE SECRET RACE, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle

Among all the contenders to be named 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year, none is more topical than Tyler Hamilton's disturbing expose of the tainted Lance Armstrong era in professional cycling.


The Secret Race, which Hamilton wrote in conjunction with journalist and best-selling author Daniel Coyle, builds on the confession former US Postal team member Hamilton made in front of a grand jury in 2010 during an investigation into the doping allegations that have now led to Armstrong being stripped of the seven Tour de France titles he won between 1999 and 2005.

Armstrong dismissed Hamilton's book as an example of a "washed-up cyclist talking trash for cash" but Coyle went to considerable lengths to ensure he was not imparting the one-eyed account of an embittered rival, himself effectively banned for life after failing a drugs test for a second time in 2009, and stripped of his gold medal from the 2004 Olympics only this year.

Coyle had harboured his own suspicions about Armstrong since spending almost a year following the American rider to write the essentially sympathetic biography, Lance Armstrong's War, but was not prepared to accept Hamilton's word alone that the stories of drug use, blood doping, complicity and cover-ups were true.

He recorded more the 200 hours of interviews with Hamilton but also talked to numerous independent sources, including other teammates, to verify and corroborate the claims made.

Hamilton spoke of his appearance before the grand jury as a release, an unburdening of his soul as he shared with the wider world the secrets that had tormented him for much of his career.  Coyle said that when Hamilton agreed to put it all into a book it was akin to being given "a ticket behind the wall of silence" that had allowed the doping culture in cycling to survive for so long.

Hamilton extends the confessional aspect of his court appearance by revealing the years of cheating in every complex detail, describing every way in which he felt the testers were so easily outwitted and the lengths to which the co-conspirators went to ensure their astonishing deception went undetected.

As an explanation, for the benefit of the curious but perhaps less well-informed reader, of why the Lance Armstrong story, and all its ramifications, is so huge, Hamilton's book will make a riveting, jaw-dropping read.  For cycling fans, though, it is likely to induce considerable discomfort, perhaps even dismay, at the questions it inevitably raises again about the sport over the last couple of decades, of how much has been clean, how much a lie.

The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs is published by Bantam Books

The Secret Race is among 14 books on the longlist for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2012. A shortlist will be announced on October 26 with the winner due to be revealed on November 26. 

The list in full comprises (click on the links for more information at amazon.co.uk):

1. That Near Death Thing: Inside the Most Dangerous Race in the World, by Rick Broadbent (Orion)
2. Running with the Kenyans: Discovering the Secrets of the Fastest People on Earth, by Adharanand Finn (Faber)
3. Iron War: Dave Scott, Mark Allen, and the Greatest Race Ever Run, by Matt Fitzgerald (Quercus)
4. The Footballer Who Could Fly, by Duncan Hamilton (Century)
5. The Secret Race - Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle (Bantam Press)
6. A Weight Off My Mind: My Autobiography, by Richard Hughes, with Lee Mottershead (Racing Post)
7. Be Careful What You Wish For, by Simon Jordan (Yellow Jersey)
8. Fibber in the Heat, by Miles Jupp (Ebury Press)
9. The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final, by Richard Moore (Wisden Sports Writing)
10. Between the Lines: My Autobiography, by Victoria Pendleton with Donald McRae (HarperSport)
11. Swimming Studies, by Leanne Shapton (Particular Books)
12. A Life Without Limits: A World Champion's Journey, by Chrissie Wellington, with Michael Aylwin (Constable & Robinson)
13. Jonny: My Autobiography, by Jonny Wilkinson, with Owen Slot (Headline)
14. Shot and a Ghost: A Year in the Brutal World of Professional Squash, by James Willstrop (Rod Gilmour)

See also: Hamilton and McRae go ahead in battle for 'bookie prize'

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Intimate story of the Beauty and George Best

WHAT THEY HAVE SAID ABOUT....Babysitting George, by Celia Walden


Celia Walden, beautiful, privately-educated, the daughter of a Conservative MP and, since June last year, wife of television personality and former newspaper editor Piers Morgan, would seem the ideal journalistic fit for Daily Telegraph, for whom she is now a columnist.

Her Thursday scribblings offer a commentary, with a sometimes caustic edge, on life, or at least on life towards the upper end of the social spectrum.  It is a long way from the kind of work she was assigned as a young reporter on the staff of the Mail on Sunday in 2003.

Very different indeed, for example, from the job handed to her on a Sunday morning late in the July of that year, which involved dropping everything to fly to Malta, where her task would be to ‘babysit’ the paper’s star columnist, one George Best.

As a 26-year-old girl with, by her own confession, "little interest in footballers or alcoholics and still less curiosity for the travails of an alcoholic former footballer," she seemed decidedly ill-suited to be minder for Best, who had been writing about life with his new, transplanted liver only for temptation to get the better of him again, culminating in his decision to flee London for a life of sun and chardonnay in a Mediterranean hiding place.

But Walden’s editor, aware that there is no such thing, feared his columnist might easily share his intoxicated thoughts with a rival paper willing to ply him with drink, and decided that a pretty, young, female reporter was the right person to ensure that it didn’t happen.

Given Best’s reputation as a lothario, regardless of how much alcohol was in his system, it seemed an unusual choice but Walden's good looks naturally aroused Best’s curiosity and enabled his unlikely guardian to establish a platonic but nonetheless intimate relationship with the fallen footballer.

She has now turned her recollections of that relationship into a book, Babysitting George, published by Bloomsbury.  In the words of the publishers, it is a “tender and beautifully written account of a unique relationship between a young journalist and a dying star, (which) questions the cold, exploitative nature of tabloid journalism, the terrifying, all-consuming nature of addiction and the deeply humane, implausible friendships that can change one's life forever.”

Here’s how it has been received by a number of reviewers:

Walden compellingly records a hero’s decline and decline: “Celebrities, for us,” she says, “exist solely to entertain and be judged. By the end of that summer, the entertainment had stopped and the judgments had been made. And after the expectation of his death came its anticipation.”
The last time she sees him is in a cheap hotel, and his appearance is so apt, and so aptly described, that you have to read it for yourself. It encapsulates a celebrity’s relationship with his own fame, which is this book’s achievement throughout.
-- Tom Payne, Daily Telegraph. Read more…

Celia Walden's new George Best-related memoir, often seems to be asking the question: is there anything more unappealing than a muck-raking tabloid journalist? Happily, the answer lies within its pages. There is something worse: muck-raking tabloid journalism with pretensions towards something grander….It is undoubtedly a sad tale and one that is made all the more so by the spectacle of Best being dug up once again and marched about the place in his vomit-caked dressing gown, obediently coughing up one last exclusive.
-- Barney Ronay, The Guardian.  Read more…

Even though this is a story we know, a strand of the nation's soap opera that ran for decades, Walden tells it with heart and insight. The Best she shows us was smarter than she let on to her journo friends. She knew what they wanted to hear: that he was a lech, a maniac, drunk as a skunk. That's what she'd tell them. But the real Best, with his sly intelligence, shy charm, sudden coldness - that, she shows us, was a different man altogether.  She's kind to him. She brings him back to a life mercifully free of red-top cliches.
-- David Robinson, The Scotsman. Read more…

Buy Babysitting George from Amazon.

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How a defeat for England on the football field was a metaphor for national decline

A review by Anthony Clavane

When I was a history teacher, I would have killed for a contemporary historian like Dominic Sandbrook. Or a contemporary history book like State of Emergency. The likes of Eric Hobsbawm and Arthur Marwick would often produce great masterpieces, but they failed to engage with popular culture. And they particularly failed to engage with the sporting events that shaped people's lives.

So three cheers for Sandbrook who, entirely predictably, has been labelled "middlebrow" by that breed of earnest, high-minded academic who once dismissed the mighty AJP Taylor as a populist. AJP, of course, would never have dreamed of viewing popular culture through the prism of sport. Nor of describing an England football defeat, as Sandbrook does, as summing up the country's "wider economic and political decline".

The defeat in question was the first leg of the 1972 European Championship quarter-final against West Germany. The following year's home draw against Poland, which cost Alf Ramsey's side a place in the World Cup, would have been a more obvious emblem of decline. But Sandbrook has no great love for the obvious. Every page is full of original insights and telling detail. Did you know that Tory prime minister Edward Heath supported Arsenal? Or that he nursed a secret ambition to run a hotel? Or that Carry On star Kenneth Williams thought Don Revie would "make a better impression" as PM than either Heath or Harold Wilson? No, neither did I.

When lazy contemporary historians are not airbrushing the much-maligned Revie from history, they are gleefully casting him as the devil incarnate. A bit like the Thatcherites' treatment of poor old Ted. I remember one study of the era declaring that Revie's Leeds were, "in part responsible for everything bad about British sport and sporting attitudes" during this low, dishonest decade. In this brilliant third instalment of his ambitious social history of modern Britain, however, the Wolves fan sticks up for The Don. 

The dour, sinister Revie portrayed in the film The Damned United might appear to be a perfect fit in an age of miners' strikes, tower blocks and political corruption. Sandbrook, to his credit, challenges the dominant view, hailing him as a pioneer, a flawed revolutionary. So, as a Leeds United fan, I salute him. And as an ex-history teacher, I congratulate him for repeatedly looking at the bigger picture. Like Heath, Revie was a neurotically-insecure social climber. Like Ted, he was a product of the Depression years. Both were awkward misfits who rose from humble origins and were often crippled by self-doubt. It is fashionable - as, say, Alwyn W. Turner argues in 'Crisis? What Crisis? Britain In The 1970s' - to attack 'Don Readies' for his greed. "But the key factor," writes Sandbrook, "was surely not avarice but anxiety." The same thing could also be said of the Trade Unionists who were ritually accused of bringing the country to its knees.

The Heath-Revie era was a time of transition, an age of both anxiety and affluence. The post-war settlement had collapsed and the Thatcherite service economy had yet to take shape. "The old is dying and the new cannot be born," as Antonio Gramsci remarked of an earlier time. "In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." 

One man's Morbid Age is another's Golden Age. As Sandbrook points out, this was an egalitarian moment, a period when unfashionable, provincial football teams could come from nowhere to win trophies. "Between 1970 and 1981," he tells us, "seven different clubs won the league title, while ten different clubs won the FA Cup." Contrast this with the post-Sky era -- and weep. Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United have won every championship since Blackburn Rovers' triumph in 1995. 

But Sandbrook is no nostalgist. Nostalgia is airbrushing of the mind. It sucks away at the deep and jagged lines of a country's divided and fraught history. Back in the Seventies, Britain was ripping itself apart. Football, like politics, was in ferment. Fans chanted "We hate humans" and hooliganism became "out of control". The optimism of the 60s had dissolved and the classless, meritocratic experiment was about to implode. "As is so often the case," wrote the Daily Mirror's Peter Wilson after the Poland game, "we have been content to dwell in the past and rest complacently on past triumphs until events - and other nations - overtake and surpass us."


You could argue, what with our present penchant for all things Seventies, with the success of novelists such as David Peace and Jonathan Coe, and with the popularity of TV series like Life On Mars and films like The Damned United, that we, today, are stuck in the past. There is a pining for the good-old-bad-old-days when clubs spotted footballers in local schools rather than imported them from Estonia, Serbia and Mexico. When British, not foreign, talent dominated the top flight. When teams outside the top three had a chance of glory.

"Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?" asked Sam Tyler in Life On Mars. "Whatever’s happened, it’s like I’ve landed on a different planet." Sandbrook's stunningly rich narrative transports us back to a world of the three-day week, IRA atrocities and muddy sport. There are at least fifty references to football, most of them reminding us what the 'beautiful game', with its galactic wage bills and overpaid primadonnas, has lost. 

Planet Seventies has a bad reputation: part joke, part nightmare; economic decline, poor industrial relations and Jason King's "extraordinarily effeminate attire". For those of us who came of age during the era, however, it was an age of affluence and social mobility. State Of Emergency is a reminder of this lost, disappearing world.


Anthony Clavane is a sports writer with the Sunday Mirror and author of Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United.


Read more about Promised Land.


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Engaging tale of Kiwi heroics

A review by Andy Wilson


In this lull between the summer and the Ashes, the intriguingly-titled What Are You Doing Out Here? is a diverting, informative and enjoyable read.

Norman Harris, who I first encountered as a sub-editor at the Observer and in recent years has become a regular and welcome presence in the Durham press box, has detailed a remarkable sporting story of which I suspect most readers would have been completely unaware - I certainly was.

It surrounds the Christmas Test of 1953 between New Zealand and South Africa in Johannesburg, and a brave last-wicket stand between Bert Sutcliffe and Bob Blair.

What's so remarkable about that? First, Sutcliffe had been forced to retire hurt, and taken to hospital, after being struck on the head by Neil Adcock early in the New Zealand innings, but insisted on resuming - fortified by a glass of whisky, and with bandages resembling a turban - as they struggled to avoid the follow-on.

Blair, meanwhile, had discovered in the early hours of Boxing Day morning that his fiancée, Nerissa Love, was one of 153 people killed in the Tangiwai train disaster that had shocked Kiwis all over the world. Yet later that afternoon, he insisted on batting at number 11, receiving a standing ovation from the Ellis Park crowd.

"What are you doing out here?" Sutcliffe asked him, giving Harris the title of his book. "We're in trouble, so I'm out here," Blair replies, and the pair put on 33, with Sutcliffe taking four sixes off a single over from Hugh Tayfield.

Harris tells the story in the present tense, having conducted interviews with a number of participants including Blair, who contributes the foreword.

Published in New Zealand by Last Side Publishing, What Are You Doing Out Here? is available in the UK from Ian Dyer Cricket Books (01748 822786; www.cricketbooks.co.uk), at £9.99.

Andy Wilson writes about cricket and rugby league for The Guardian newspaper.

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Insights and anecdotes -- but shirt tales keep the real Hodge under wraps

A review by Jeremy Culley

The infamous role of Diego Maradona in Argentina’s 1986 World Cup quarter-final with England has become one of football’s greatest paradoxes.

The performance, defined equally by the genius of his bewitching second goal as it was by the despicability of his controversial first, propelled his standing in the eyes of the English public from that of a world class player to an all-time great, albeit a flawed one.  

But, for England’s embittered fan base, the memories of this match, which provided possibly the greatest goal and the biggest injustice in modern football history, extend to many of Maradona’s supporting act as well. Who could forget a furious Peter Shilton charging at the referee after the diminutive Maradona had miraculously leapt above him to score Argentina’s first? Or John Barnes bringing some flair to the occasion from a white shirt? Or Gary Linekar heading in to give England hope, and himself a sixth goal of the tournament?

Strange then that the defining contribution from an Englishman to proceedings has not become quite so legendary. Without Steve Hodge slicing a volleyed clearance early in the second half, the ’Hand of God’ would never have happened. Hodge, from Gedling, on the outskirts of Nottingham, has a particularly interesting take on the day, having swapped shirts with Maradona before discovering the extent of his cheating. This tale is told in Hodge’s autobiography,  The Man With Maradona's Shirt, so called because the famous Number 10 jersey resided in Hodge’s loft until he allowed the National Football Museum in Preston house it in 2002.

That day in Mexico City would turn out to be Hodge’s last World Cup finals appearance, as selection decisions and injury would conspire against him in Italy four years later. A measure of Steve Hodge as a man is the lack of ill-feeling he holds towards Maradona, for cheating him out of his only World Cup, or to Sir Bobby Robson, who denied him the chance to play in a second. Indeed he remembers with great sadness playing in an England legends team against their German counterparts at St James’ Park, a match held in Sir Bobby’s honour, just days before his death.

His experience of the management of Robson, Terry Venables at Tottenham and Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest has given Hodge more right than most to convey opinions on the game, as well as a multitude of hilarious anecdotes to recount as well. He spent the best part of his career with the inimitable Clough, having been signed by Forest as a schoolboy, before returning for a second spell after periods at Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspur.

His book is inevitably filled with priceless Clough moments but also contains more sobering aspects of his time at Forest. He provides a fascinating insight into the effects the Hillsborough disaster had on Clough and the Forest squad, an area generally overlooked when reprising the tragedy, and offers some opinions on Clough’s health problems later in life.

Football is the predominant subject of the book -- no bad thing for fans who buy it, admittedly -- but the balance is probably too heavily weighted towards Hodge’s career. His personal life and activities away from the game are rarely mentioned, something which would give the book an extra dimension. Professional problems are explored in detail, such as his feeling of homesickness when living in London during his time with Spurs and his despair at being left out of the 1991 FA Cup final by Brian Clough. But his experiences away from the game, those of a single bachelor for the majority of his career and subsequently of a married man with three children, are mentioned only in passing, which is to the detriment of an otherwise excellent recount of a football career which, for 17 years, was spent with the best players and at the highest level.

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Moving stories reveal stark realities of northern culture

A review by Andy Wilson


Sport as social history, anyone? Two rugby league books that have been published in recent weeks – one biography, one autobiography, whose subject matters really are chalk and cheese – are as fascinating for their insights into the development of northern working-class culture over the last few decades as for the professional stories of the players involved.


John Holmes grew up in 1950s Kirkstall, a couple of miles from Headingley, where he would wear the blue and amber of Leeds with great distinction in a career spanning the next four decades.

'There was a strong sense of community within that area of Leeds,' recalls his brother Phil, who began working with his own son, Phil Jr, an English teacher at Leeds grammar school, to tell John's story shortly before his death from cancer last autumn at the age of 59. 'A row of shops would provide everything any family would require ... bakers, Bradbury's butchers, a paper shop and, for the children, the most wonderful yet frustrating shop in the neighbourhood – Stead's Toys, situated where McDonald's is today.'

Terry Newton grew up in 1980s Wigan, and the first couple of chapters of his autobiography include a stabbing, a couple of thefts, a few fights, and 'getting pissed on Merrydown or Diamond White cider'. That's progress, presumably.

Both turn out to be tragic and moving stories, sympathetically told – in Newton's case by Phil Wilkinson, the Wigan Evening Post and Observer writer who, like the Holmes family, has done an excellent job.

Holmes had already lost his younger sister, Barbara, and his first wife, Jenny, to cancer before being diagnosed himself in early 2008. His brother and nephew relate how he handled such trauma with the same understated dignity and stubbornness that had made him an astonishingly modest local Leeds hero, who for years after his retirement would catch the bus into Horsforth every Friday night to watch Sky's Super League coverage with a select group of friends in the pub.

There are passages in Newton's book that are equally moving, notably those concerning the death of his younger sister, Leanne, as a result of heroin addiction. Certainly the book succeeds in revealing an endearing side of a player who was more loathed than loved during his career, even before he had worldwide notoriety thrust upon him earlier this year as the first sportsman ever to test positive for human growth hormone.

The former Leeds, Wigan, Bradford and Great Britain hooker had been working on the book for months before that bombshell. As he says in a blunt prologue that sets the tone for what follows: 'This book wasn't supposed to start like this. I'd practically finished it when I had to break the news to Phil Wilkinson, my ghost writer, that we might have to redo the ending.'

They have redone much more than that, and Newton's account of why, then how – and how easily – he took HGH (human growth hormone), and of being caught, is as riveting as it is worrying. He estimates that around 30 rugby league players may have been administering the injections – in Newton's case in secret, with the phials hidden behind a toolbox in the garage where neither his wife nor children could find them.

He states as fact that at least a few were, including the player who sold him the first package for £150 at a service station on the M62. Slightly more encouragingly, he claims that they have all stopped as a result of Newton's ban, which came after he had been targeted for a blood test.

At the age of 31, and with another 20 months of his two-year suspension to run, Newton is now running a pub called the Ben Jonson – 'apparently it's named after a poet, and not the Canadian drugs cheat,' he notes – and wants to help warn a new generation of players away from risking a dangerous and potentially career-ending quick fix.

'Not every player will be like Kris Radlinski or Sean O'Loughlin or Paul Deacon, who had nice upbringings and were always sensible lads,' he says in a telling passage. 'There are also plenty of players who are on the same wavelength as me.

'Rugby league is a rough game and of course it attracts people from rough backgrounds, but it shouldn't be ashamed of that – it should be proud of it. Rugby league gave me a path out of trouble, and there are people in the game who grew up on rough estates like me, who probably need a bit of advice to put them back on the straight and narrow.'

Leeds in the 50s and 60s, where John Holmes and his two older brothers used to make their rugby ball out of rolled up newspaper, pinch the odd sip of Tetley's from the jug they would carry down to the Cardigan Arms and then back to their dad, and later feast on scraps from the family fish and chip shop in Horsforth, suddenly sounds impossibly romantic.

Both books also contain plenty of good rugby tales - Newton's recollections of Wigan and his early days with Leeds, and Holmes's unlikely route to tackling Bob Fulton out of the 1972 World Cup final, which involved a Widnes player falling off a tower of chairs. The warmth of the tribute that was paid to Holmes following his death last autumn, with the biggest parade of former team-mates I can remember before Leeds's play-off victory against the Catalans Dragons, removed any doubts that he will be remembered as one of the club's favourite sons.

Andy Wilson writes on rugby league and cricket for the Guardian newspaper.

Reluctant Hero: The John Holmes Story, is published by Scratching Shed Publishing Ltd. 

Coming Clean, is published by Vertical Editions.


Click on the links to buy.  For more on rugby league, visit The Sports Bookshelf Shop.


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The real purpose of cricket quotations

It is a fact beyond dispute that, outside the nine or 10 nations in which it is a mainstream sport, foreigners don't really get cricket. Even in some of the countries represented at the ICC World Twenty20, which begins in Guyana on Friday, mention of the game will draw more quizzical looks than comprehension.

Of all the things about the game that induce only bafflement, high on the list is the idea that it could have been devised in England. How does anyone invent a game to be played in dry conditions outdoors, over four or even five days, in a country where, on average, rain falls on one day in every three?

The answer may be more simple than you think. Clearly, given the number of new cricket books published each year, it was to give spectators convenient interludes in which to read!

Of course, not all rain stoppages are equal, and while hours of unremitting drizzle are not exactly an uncommon feature of an English summer there are stop-start days as well, which can be frustrating for the reader, especially if he is trying to settle into the rhythm of a more weighty work.

But cricket's literary riches offer the solution to this dilemma, too, in the form of handy little volumes stuffed with nothing but quotations -- perfect to dip in and out of when showers are about.

The Sports Bookshelf's current favourite comes from the yellow-jacketed Wisden collection, edited by Lawrence Booth and entitled "What are the Butchers For?": And Other Splendid Cricket Quotations.

As you would expect from Booth, always a writer with an eye for the quirkier side of the game, it looks beyond the obvious sources. To whet your appetite, try guessing who said what from among the following...

1 -- 'Test Match Special is all chocolate cakes and jolly japes, but I didn't enjoy being called a wheelie bin and neither did my family.'

2 -- 'Cricket is basically baseball on valium.'

3 -- 'I did call him Freddie once, but he said: "No, you can't call me Freddie. I'm Andrew to you."'

4 -- 'To be honest, Mark, I'm struggling.'

5 -- 'Great! Just great!... When does it start?'

6 -- 'I'd buy Luton Town football club.'

7 -- 'Remember to say "Good areas", "Work hard", "Keep it simple"'

8 -- 'How can you tell your wife you are just popping out to play a match and then not come back for five days?'

Click here for the answers.

Lawrence Booth's eye for humour in cricket earned him a large following when he wrote a weekly online column, The Spin, for the Guardian. His move to the Daily Mail might have spelled the end for The Spin but happily it has been reincarnated as Top Spin on dailymail.co.uk.

By the way, it was an American actress, Pauline Chase, who is thought to have asked 'What are the Butchers For?' when she spotted the white-coated umpires at a cricket match in the early 1900s.  Chase starred in the title role of Peter Pan during a seven-year run at London theatres at around the same time, having been introduced to Peter Pan author J M Barrie, who was a cricket enthusiast.

For more by Lawrence Booth or more on cricket, visit The Sports Bookshelf Shop.

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A trumpeter for the Pyramid

Having announced himself as a football writer of note with Behind the Curtain, his journey around Eastern European football, Jonathan Wilson seemed to be taking an enormous risk when he set about trying to entertain his newly-acquired audience with a history of football tactics.

It just seemed too dry, too narrow a subject. The kind of person who would identify Dario Gradi as an ideal dinner guest might find it fascinating. But beyond that...?

In fact, Wilson's Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics has been among the top sellers among football books since it was released in paperback last June. Up to press, 37,000 copies have been printed and it is being translated into seven languages.

Gary Naylor, aka Mouth of the Mersey and the Tooting Trumpet, provided The Sports Bookshelf with the following review:

"Riquelme has become less a player than a cipher for an ideology". This elegant biography in a sentence turns up on page 326 of Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics. If you're even mildly engaged by those twelve words, the 351 pages that surround them will reward you with an extraordinarily rich rollercoaster ride through what is less a history of football tactics, more a history of men thinking about football.

Fortunately our guide, Jonathan Wilson, presents his history in an orthodox chronological structure as we flit from continent to continent, looking on, as the pyramid (the formation in which a team is set up) is not so much inverted as perverted from 2-3-5 to 3-2-2-3 (the classic WM) to 4-1-4-1 and all points in between. Tantalisingly, a possible future of 4-6-0 is mooted - indeed Sir Alex Ferguson's Champions League winners may well have played this formation without us realising.

But it would be a huge disservice to the writer to give the impression that this is a technical theoretical treatise - like the best popular history, the writer wears his learning lightly without ever talking down to his readers. And, also characteristic of the genre, the narrative is packed with unforgettable portraits of extraordinary men. Wanderers like Jimmy Hogan embedded football thinking in central Europe and Bela Guttmann proselytised his 4-2-4 gospel from continent to continent. Great teams, as well known as Hungary's 1953 vanquishers of England and as forgotten as Austria's inter-war Wunderteam, are brought to life as if they were playing last week. Influential players, like the tragic Matthias Sindelar and coaching innovators like Arrigo Sacchi are placed within the wider ebb and flow of football thinking and given due credit for their willingness to theorise, then practise new ways of playing football.

One puts the book down with two overwhelming feelings. Firstly, that the game is so very much richer than is generally perceived in Britain - never mind 6-0-6 callers pleading for a "bit of passion" as the panacea for all English footballers' shortcomings, how about the sheer blinkeredness of those paid to explain the game, from TV pundits to writers in the Press Box? Secondly, that the game is evolving more rapidly than ever before and that British managers and coaches (one florid-featured Manchester-based pensioner excepted) are as emotionally and psychologically distant they have ever been from such developments. If I live thirty more years, I am more convinced than ever that I will not see England win a World Cup.

Oh, just one last thing. On page 284, Watford didn't beat Everton 5-4, they lost 4-5. I know - I was there and nothing quite beats that, even if Wilson's book comes mighty close.

You can read more by Naylor under his Tooting Trumpet hat at 99.94, which presents "cricket analysis from beyond the boundary".

Wilson's latest book The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches is due for release on May 20th.

For more by Jonathan Wilson and more on football, visit The Sports Bookshelf Shop.

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Gerrard story desperate for successful new chapter

Review: by William Sansome

For Steven Gerrard, this season has been one of epic disappointment.

Last season's runners-up spot was the closest Liverpool have come for some time to a first domestic title since 1990. Yet this campaign’s challenge fell abysmally short long ago while their prospects of competing in the Champions League next year seem fainter by the day.

The Huyton-born England man has also watched Fabio Capello choose Rio Ferdinand as the successor to John Terry as England captain, despite his own credentials being arguably more compelling.

All this as the Liverpool and England midfielder nears the end of his prime years, with the possibility of having to leave his beloved Anfield to pursue further glory becoming ever more real.

But out of adversity often springs success and for Gerrard, who will be 30 in less than two months' time, this has been a defining aspect of his career. His autobiography, Gerrard: My Autobiography, winner of ‘Sports Book of the Year’ at the British Book Awards in 2007, brilliantly describes the far from straightforward path to stardom he has taken.

His career was nearly finished at the age of nine, when he kicked a garden fork during a kick-about on a field near his home, almost leading to his toe being amputated.

Crucially, though, his reaction to the loss of his cousin, Jon-Paul Gilhooley, illustrates his determination to motivate himself through adversity. Gilhooley, sharing Gerrard’s passion for Liverpool, was one of the 96 people killed in the Hillsborough disaster. He travelled to the FA Cup semi-final with Nottingham Forest but never returned and Gerrard has been inspired by the untimely death of his cousin every time he has donned the Liverpool red since.

This passion may well be the factor that keeps him at Anfield for his whole career, and certainly influenced his decision to refuse the approaches of Chelsea in 2006, another subject covered in detail in the book.

There are candid accounts of Gerrard’s feelings over setbacks he had to overcome. As a schoolboy at Liverpool he battled in the shadow of ‘boy wonder’ Michael Owen to establish himself, and to become a leading world footballer he had to recover from the bitter disappointment of being ruled out of the 2002 World Cup through injury.

Finally, in leading Liverpool to their greatest triumph in the Premier League era, in the 2005 Champions League final, he not only motivated himself but was able to rally the dressing room in what seemed like a hopeless situation. Liverpool’s fifth-place finish, below Merseyside rivals Everton, had meant there was no guarantee of future Champions League football and AC Milan’s 3-0 half-time lead in the final looked unassailable.

With all this in mind, no one would rule out Gerrard reacting to this stagnant Liverpool season by inspiring his country to glory in South Africa, a feat which will inevitably demand a postscript to his gripping life story.

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