The Sports Bookshelf

SPORTS BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS: FOOTBALL BIOGRAPHIES No one would dispute Barcelona's status as the greatest club team of the century so far and two books in 2012 have gone a long way to explaining why the pride of Catalonia came to symbolise both power and artistry in football. Graham Hunter's Barca: The Making of the Greatest Team in the World (Back Page Press) draws on the considerable knowledge of the club Scottish journalist Hunter has accumulated since deciding to base himself in Spain. Hunter was the only English-speaking  journalist to interview Pep Guardiola during his time as coach at the Nou Camp. Yet, perhaps inevitably, Hunter's admirable book is eclipsed by Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning (Orion), written by the Spanish journalist Guillem Balague -- who is based in England, as it happens. Balague, well known to English television viewers as one of the presenters of Spanish football on Sky Sports, won the trust of Guardiola in a way that no o

SPORTS BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS: RUGBY UNION Christmas 2012 comes too early for the definitive story of the England rugby team's astounding victory over the All Blacks at Twickenham to make it into print but while that one waits to be written there are plenty of contenders for the rugby fan's wish list. They range from the year's bestseller, Jonny Wilkinson's Jonny: My Autobiography to Behind the Lions , a collection of stories that will whet the appetite for next summer's tour of Australia by the British and Irish Lions. Wilkinson's story, ghost written by Times journalist Owen Slot, made the longlist for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2012 , both for the quality of the writing and the depth of the England fly-half's soul-searching.   Wilkinson has been a tortured soul, wracked by self-doubt, fearful of the future to the extent that, even in his career-defining moment, when his drop goal sealed England's historic World Cup victor

WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2012 The Secret Race , the jaw-dropping expose about the drug-taking, blood-doping, cheating and cover-ups that revealed so much of professional cycling's recent history to be a sham, had to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for 2012, in the words of the judging panel, because it "fundamentally changed the sport being written about". It was to a large extent the evidence of former Olympic champion and leading Tour de France rider Tyler Hamilton to a grand jury after US federal prosecutors pursued a two-year investigation into allegations of doping against Lance Armstrong that led this year to the announcement by the United States Anti-Doping Agency that Armstrong should be stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and banned for life. That evidence is outlined in all its disturbing detail in The Secret Race , which Hamilton, who was Armstrong's teammate in the US Postal Team, had begun writing in collabo

WILLIAM HILL SHORTLIST A Life With No Limits: A World Champion's Journey, by Chrissie Wellington There are some uplifting stories among the shortlist for the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year, the winner of which will be revealed tomorrow, but on that score this tale of triumph over adversity arguably trumps them all. Chrissie Wellington, four times winner of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship, world record holder, unbeaten in 13 competitive events in the most gruelling test of combined athletics disciplines, can be described quite reasonably as the toughest female athlete on the planet. There are not many, after all, who could complete a 2.4-mile swim, an 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile running marathon one after the other, let alone do so in 8hrs 18min 32sec, a staggering 32 minutes faster than the record she broke in doing so. Yet Wellington did not run a marathon until she was 25, in London, before which she had endured an adolescence so trouble

WILLIAM HILL SHORTLIST Be Careful What You Wish For, by Simon Jordan (Yellow Jersey) When Simon Jordan bought Crystal Palace in 2000 he believed he could change football.  Just 32 years old, his bank balance swollen from the £73 million sale of the mobile phone retailer he had built up with business partner Andrew Briggs, he was ready to take on everyone he loathed in the game, from the establishment figures he felt put their own interests ahead of the game, down to the agents he saw as nothing better than leeches. Blond-haired, perma-tanned and brashly opinionated, it was inevitable he would encounter suspicion and distrust in the world he had infiltrated.  Yet he loved Crystal Palace, the club he had supported all his life and where his father had once been a player, and was determined not only that he would turn them into a thriving Premier League club but that he would do it on his terms. Of course, it all ended in tears.  Jordan fulfilled his promise of taking Palace

WILLIAM HILL SHORTLIST Fibber in the Heat, by Miles Jupp (Ebury Press) Nowadays, Miles Jupp could not contemplate the audacious feat he pulled off in 2006, when he managed to blag his way on to the England cricket team's tour of India as a member of the travelling press corps.  Having played the part of a press officer - ironically - in the BBC's political satire The Thick of It among a fairly lengthy list of TV appearances, as actor and stand-up comedian, there is no way on England's current excursion to the same country that he could go unrecognised. But six years ago it was different.  Though he had taken the first steps in a television career, and though Jupp's role as Archie, the eccentric inventor in the CBeebies show Balamory , had led some people to shout at him in the in the street, the chances of his being identified for what he really was were still relatively slim. Fibber in the Heat, shortlisted for the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Y

THE WILLIAM HILL SHORTLIST That Near Death Thing - Inside the TT: the World's Most Dangerous Race, by Rick Broadbent (Orion) The Isle of Man Tourist Trophy used to be the most prestigious motorcycle race in the world, the British leg of the Grand Prix world championship, contested by the biggest names on the circuit, iconic figures such as Giacomo Agostini, Mike Hailwood and Phil Read. But it was always the most dangerous, too.  It is an extraordinary spectacle, the sight of expensive, super-powered racing machines weaving through village streets lined by cottages, pubs and corner shops. Likewise as they accelerate to speeds of up to 200 mph with nothing between them and the telegraph poles and dry stone walls of the island's mountainous country roads. Yet it has come with a heavy price.  Since the first fatality in 1911, 239 riders have been killed. The perennial debate over safety concerns came to a head in 1972, when the death of the 31-year-old Italian rider

THE WILLIAM HILL SHORTLIST Running With the Kenyans, by Adharanand Finn (Faber & Faber) Adharanand Finn's talent for running shone through at school. As a 12-year-old growing up in Northampton, he broke a schools 800-metre record and, five minutes later, lined up for a 1500m event and won that one too.  He joined a running club and a lifelong passion began. It is around this time that Finn begins to notice the growing numbers and frequent successes of East African runners in the world's most important long-distance races, and increasingly athletes from Kenya.  He asks himself why this might be and plants the seeds of another obsession. As education, career, marriage and children occupy the years that follow, the need to find the answer is hardly a priority but the question still lurks in the recesses of Finn's mind.  Years later, working as a freelance contributor to Runner's World magazine, he has an assignment that involves taking part in a 10km race

Who wins the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2012 is entirely down to the panel of judges but if their assessment of the seven titles shortlisted is a reflection of sales figures then Tyler Hamilton's Tour de France exposé The Secret Race will take the prize. According to data compiled by Nielsen Bookscan , more than 10,500 copies of The Secret Race were sold in only six weeks following its UK publication in mid-September by Bantam Press. Most of these sales came before the United States Anti-Doping Agency effectively endorsed the accusations Hamilton makes in the book by branding seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong a "serial cheat" on the basis of testimony offered under oath by Hamilton and others. The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France, written with the help of former Armstrong biographer Daniel Coyle, came about after Hamilton, himself a self-confessed drugs cheat, decided he would come clean about cycling's

Here's a question -- in which sport does Britain boast the top two male players in the world and two of the top four women yet did not win a single medal at London 2012? The answer is squash.  And the reason for its conspicuous lack of success in Britain's golden year is that, as yet, squash is not an Olympic sport, despite years of lobbying for inclusion. It has featured in the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games since 1998 but never in an Olympics. That might change this time next year.  Having missed out in London and again in Rio in 2016, squash has turned to Mike Lee, the bid strategist behind London 2012 and Qatar's controversial securing of the 2018 World Cup, to steer their campaign for a place at the 2020 Olympics.  Squash will learn its fate when the International Olympic Committee meets in Buenos Aires next October to elect the host city and decide which new sports get the nod. It will be too late for James Willstrop and Nick Matthew, who will go int

When Duncan Hamilton won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for the first time in 2007 the first hand he shook was that of Bobby Charlton, whose autograph he had once queued for in vain as a small boy growing up in Newcastle. It was a moment that Hamilton felt was 'scarcely credible' . Charlton had been a contender for the award himself for My Manchester United Years , the first volume of his autobiography, brilliantly crafted by the veteran sportswriter Jim Lawton, but it had been beaten by Hamilton's book Provided You Don't Kiss Me, an entertaining, perceptive and well-received account of the time he had spent working with Brian Clough as a local newspaper reporter during the glory years of Nottingham Forest. Hamilton recalls the moment in The Footballer Who Could Fly (Century), for which Hamilton has been longlisted for the 2012 William Hill award.  The Footballer Who Could Fly is on one level a journey through football in England from the 1940s