The Sports Bookshelf

As the ‘ghost’ assigned to write George Best’s newspaper column in the early 1970s, journalist John Roberts was in an enviable position as Best’s career at Manchester United began to unravel. With unparalleled access to football’s original superstar when Best first walked out on United in 1972, Roberts enjoyed exclusive, inside knowledge -- perfect material for a book about those turbulent years in the Irishman’s life. Those unique insights are published this week.  But should you be wondering how it took almost 40 years for Roberts to reveal the secrets he knew about an extraordinary story, The Sports Bookshelf can reveal that it didn’t. Sod This, I'm Off to Marbella - George Best , published on July 1 by Trinity Mirror Sport Media, enjoyed a brief life -- under a different title -- in 1973 but while there was undoubtedly an audience that would have lapped it up, the book effectively failed to reach them. “It was published independently as George Best: Fall of a Superstar

If the outcome of England’s World Cup match against Germany in Bloemfontein is to be determined by whichever set of players is the strongest mentally, it is to be hoped that the English players do not share the thought processes of the average English supporter. England’s last competitive encounter with the Germans resulted in a 5-1 victory in the Olympic Stadium in Munich in September 2001 in qualification for the 2002 World Cup finals. Yet how much have we dwelt on that result compared with the semi-finals at Italia ‘90 and Euro ‘96, both of which England lost on penalties, or even the quarter-final in the Mexico World Cup in 1970, when England led 2-0 but wound up beaten 3-2 by Gerd Muller’s extra-time winner? Between the 1966 World Cup final and the 2000 European Championship finals in Holland and Belgium, England did not win a single competitive match against Germany and even the victory in Charleroi in 2000 was a hollow affair, given that neither side qualified for the kno

Among the many tennis books that now have one serious omission after the history-making epic contest between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, here’s one that is scarcely less worthy for being overtaken by the incredible events on Wimbledon’s Court 18. 101 Incredible Moments in Tennis: The Good, the Bad and the Infamous is an entirely subjective collection of classic matches and milestone events in the history of the game, although it is hard to imagine author Joshua Shifrin would exclude Isner’s extraordinary victory by 70-68 in the fifth. Shifrin, a tennis fanatic who was a junior player and has coached in the United States for more than 20 years, spent many hours deciding which 101 moments were worthy of inclusion and assembles them in ascending order. He starts with Anne White’s appearance in an all-white figure-hugging body suit at Wimbledon in 1985 and concludes with Rafael Nadal’s defeat of Roger Federer in the 2008 Wimbledon final, widely regarded as the greatest match ever

Fabio Capello should brace himself for more critical scrutiny of the disciplinarian man-management style that has seen his approval rating as England coach begin to slide for the first time during the team's stuttering World Cup campaign. It will come with the English publication later this year of Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti's candid memoir, Preferisco la Coppa . The book's content attracted headlines in England with its release in Milan because it revealed candid details of Ancelotti's meetings with Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich while he was still negotiating to become manager at Stamford Bridge. His views on Capello received an airing in some newspapers, but it was the descriptions of what Abramovich said and did in supposedly secret liaisons that was the talking point, raising suggestions that it might jeopardise Ancelotti's move to London. That is unlikely to be the case this time after tensions surfaced between Capello and his players in the wake

Sports book sales have not been immune in a generally sluggish year for non-fiction sales but interest generated by the World Cup has seen some sharp increases in figures. According to Nielsen BookScan -- as reported on www.thebookseller.com -- some football titles have enjoyed spectacular surges. For example, Torres: El Niño: My Story , the autobiography of Liverpool and Spain striker Fernando Torres, published by HarperSport, has become the top-selling football memoir, with sales up to more than 1,200 copies per week, an increase of a massive 7,450 per cent on pre-World Cup figures. The bestselling new World Cup book -- Keir Radnedge's 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Official Book (Carlton) -- has been jumping off the shelves at a rate of around 3,000 copies per week, some 55 per cent better than a month ago. Meanwhile, sales of Radnedge's FIFA World Football Records 2010 (Carlton), published in September 2009, leapt from just 47 copies sold during the week ending Ma

Jon Henderson might have taken a calculated gamble when he chose 'The Last Champion' as the title for his biography of Fred Perry.  Then again, he probably didn't.  Andy Murray has still some way to go, it seems, if he is to succeed where Tim Henman failed in emulating Perry's feat in winning the Wimbledon championships, which he did three times.  In any event, Murray is Scottish.  Perry will remain the last Englishman to win Wimbledon for some time to come. Perry suffered the fate that seems regularly to befall British sporting champions in that the more successful he became, the less popular.  Winning requires a certain single-mindedness that British audiences often mistake for aloofness or arrogance, as golfers such as Nick Faldo or racing drivers such as Nigel Mansell discovered. We prefer our sporting heroes to be modest, self-effacing and only quietly confident; Perry was none of these. Quite the opposite.  Jack Kramer, the American player who would win Wi

The choice of title for a former England World Cup star's book of football memories has led to a surge of interest in the shirt worn by Diego Maradona when he scored the infamous "hand of God" goal that helped to end England's participation in the 1986 tournament. Steve Hodge picked The Man With Maradona's Shirt as a suitable name for a book based on diaries kept during his career in the game because he really is "the man with Maradona's shirt", having swapped tops with the Argentine genius shortly after the infamous quarter-final in Mexico City. The shirt, which spent more than 15 years in Hodge's attic after the 1986 finals, will be on display in Nottingham Castle for the next three months. Hodge, now 47, hopes that allowing people to look at the shirt in his home city will help raise Nottingham's profile as a potential host city at the 2018 World Cup, should England's bid to stage the tournament be successful. The former Notti

The Sports Bookshelf offers some timely advice for anyone stuck on what to give the sports-loving man/boy in their life on June 20 with a selection of five sports books new in the shops. Follow the highlighted links to buy. No Holding Back: The Autobiography (Michael Holding; W&N) The former West Indies fast bowler wrote about his career in cricket in his 1993 autobiography Whispering Death.  In this new look back, Holding retraces his time on the field but devotes equal priority to his views on many issues in the game from his position as respected media commentator.  He is particularly forthright on Sir Allen Stanford’s ill-fated involvement with England and the West Indies, on illegal bowling actions, on the decline of cricket in his native Caribbean and on the consequences of Twenty20’s seemingly unstoppable growth. Why England Lose: And other curious phenomena explained (Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski; Harper Collins) Written by a football writer (Kuper) and an econ

It goes without saying that defeat for England against the United States when their World Cup campaign kicks off in Rustenburg tomorrow would come as a surprise, although not, of course, on anything like the scale of the 1-0 loss in Belo Horizonte during the 1950 finals in Brazil. Today, no shock is ever ruled out, but a win for USA then was regarded as not so much unlikely as out of the question.  No photographer captured the winning goal, for example, because all of the snappers sent to cover the contest were positioned behind the American net, expecting a deluge of scoring from the England team. In the press box, meanwhile, there was only one American journalist, Dent McSkimming from the St Louis Despatch, who funded the trip to Brazil himself after the newspaper declined to pay his passage.  His report was the only one to appear in any major American newspaper. The match kicked off at 9pm London time and communication was primitive to say the least. When first notification o

It is probably no surprise that much of the best writing about England's history in the World Cup has been focused on the personalities of the 1966 finals.  The Sports Bookshelf has picked out five titles as recommended reading -- three autobiographies and three independent studies. Naturally, autobiographies tend to be written from a subjective viewpoint but a couple from members of the victorious 1966 England team are worthwhile reads. Geoff Hurst's 1966 and All That  published in hardback in 2005 with a paperback released the following spring, delivers an engaging account of how it felt to be a forward with only seven international caps, chosen ahead of the prolific Jimmy Greaves, who suddenly found himself a national hero. Forthright in his views, particularly about manager Alf Ramsey, Hurst is also strong on period detail, recreating the atmosphere of Britain in the 1960s. Nobby Stiles also offers something more than rose-tinted memories in his 2004 memoir After

If there was only one promotion success story that really mattered to football writer and Leeds United fan Phil Shaw in the season just gone, there was another that prompted a quiet cheer. Blackpool’s elevation to the Premier League means that Ian Holloway, the man behind the tangerine dream come true and a manager with no peers when it comes to off-the-wall observations on the game, will at last have a national audience -- and for Phil that can only mean good news. That’s because, as a sideline to the serious business of reporting on the national game for The Independent and other publications, Phil is an avid collector of witty, pithy and pertinent football quotations.  And if there is anyone almost guaranteed to be worth listening to next season, it is Blackpool’s loquacious Holloway. “He says he wants to be taken seriously but I don’t think he can stop himself,” Phil says. “It is people like Holloway and Gordon Strachan whose interviews you read with particular attention bec