The Sports Bookshelf

Recommended in football books Two decades ago, to mark the last season of English professional football in its traditional single-league, four-division structure, sports writer Ian Ridley embarked on a journey around the domestic game, from the top right down to grassroots level. He aimed to capture a snapshot of football at what he knew was a watershed moment in its history, with the birth of the Premier League about to bring about a transformation.  His book, Season in the Cold , won critical acclaim. At that point, football in England was in crisis, tainted by hooliganism, with attendances in decline at antiquated stadiums, and debts on the rise.  These were the factors which had collided catastrophically in two disasters, at Bradford and Hillsborough.  The Taylor Report into the latter, its recommendations leading to the compulsory development of all-seater stadia, had set the wheels of change in motion but the establishment of the Premier League and the riches generated by t

Sports books for Christmas Scratching your head for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here are a few of the more amusing sports books published this year: Who Are Ya? The talkSport Book of Football's Best Ever Chants , by Gershon Portnoi (Simon & Schuster) The excited buzz of a packed stadium is every bit as important as the competitors in making a sports event a genuinely big occasion and nowhere is that more true than football, where the crowd are participants as well as spectators. Indeed, football is unique in that not only do supporters cheer or boo in approval or otherwise, they turn their feelings, thoughts and observations into words and then set them to music, so that the action on the field comes with its own soundtrack, too. Over the years, British football fans in particular have developed a huge repertoire of songs and chants, from club anthems down to ditties aimed at i

Sports books for Christmas Scratching your head for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here's our selection of motor sport books published this year:   The Limit: Life and Death in Formula One's Most Dangerous Era , by Michael Cannell (Atlantic Books) When Dan Wheldon, the English Indycar racing driver, was killed in a spectacular crash in Las Vegas in October, the story made headlines in British newspapers, mainly because fatalities are nowadays relatively rare in motor racing.   The Limit looks at an era when such tragedies were almost expected. Focusing on 1961, it specifically examines the battle between Ferrari drivers Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Trips for the Formula One world championship, a battle quite literally fought to the death. Hill and Von Trips had risen to the top of their profession from very different roots, the former a college drop-out from California who worked as

Sports books for Christmas Scratching your head for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here's our selection of athletics books published this year:   Usain Bolt: The Story of the World's Fastest Man , by Steven Downes (SportsBooks) Considering that he was largely unknown, at least outside the world of track and field, until the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the speed with which Usain Bolt has risen to become to the best known athlete has been extraordinary. Yet the experts knew what was coming long before the rest of us, among them the athletics writer Steven Downes , who was told to remember the name when he interviewed Bolt at the 2003 world youth championships, after he had won the 200m in a competition record time. Downes has followed Bolt’s career ever since, watching him establish a permanent place in the record books by winning an unprecedented gold medal hat-trick in the 100 metre

Sports books for Christmas Scratching your head for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here's our selection of golf books published this year:   The 100 Greatest Ever Golfers , by Andy Farrell (Elliott & Thompson) Golf writer Andy Farrell afforded himself a self-congratulatory Tweet after Tiger Woods followed Rory McIlroy and Lee Westwood in taking the weekend headlines with their tournament wins in California, Hong Kong and South Africa. All three figure in Farrell’s choices for The 100 Greatest Ever Golfers , a fascinating book that serves not only as a celebration of the finest exponents of the game since the first Open Championship in 1860 but also provides a bite-sized history of championship golf. Farrell, formerly golf correspondent for the Independent and Independent on Sunday titles and now freelance, has written profiles for each of the 100 players, in which he nicely balan

Books about cricket Stumped for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here's our selection of cricket biographies published this year:   Jack Hobbs: England's Greatest Cricketer , by Leo McKinstry (Yellow Jersey) In a career spanning 30 years playing for Surrey and England, Sir Jack Hobbs scored 61,237 runs, more than any other cricketer. His 197 centuries is also a record unsurpassed. He was heralded as one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the 20th Century yet his place in the history of cricket always seems to be in the shadow of W.G. Grace, Don Bradman, Wally Hammond and Len Hutton. Why? Perhaps because Hobbs, born in poor circumstances in Cambridge at a time when the town had more than its share of grim and squalid streets, was brought up to be modest and humble and appreciative of his good fortune. McKinstry, an excellent writer and the author of fine biographies of Geoffrey Boycott,