The Sports Bookshelf

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK Sport Italia: The Italian Love Affair with Sport , by Simon Martin Published by: I B Tauris What's It About? Italian sport, as the title would suggest, but rather more than that.  Sport Italia is an expansive history of modern Italy viewed through the country's passion for sport. As such it offers a completely new portrait of Europe's most alluring and most paradoxical country, a land of contrasts, of conflicting traditions and regional disparities once described as not so much a nation as a geographical expression. Tracing Italy's sporting history at its high and low points, from its idealistic beginnings to its hijacking by political figures from Mussolini to Berlusconi, author Simon Martin interweaves elements of Italian history, its politics, its economy and society with the key moments in Italian sport.  In doing so he offers a fresh interpretation to the story of modern Italy, explaining how and why sport holds

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK The Cricketers' Who's Who 2012 ,  edited by Jo Harman Published by: Pitch Publishing on behalf of All Out Cricket What's it about? As those who would damage the beloved County Championship know all too well, if there is one thing to which cricket followers do not take kindly it is change, in particular unnecessary change. Outrage, therefore, greeted the 2011 edition of the Cricketers' Who's Who, which is not an institution of Wisden magnitude but has nonetheless been around now for 33 years. Consternation arose largely from the disappearance of the personal information and opinions that added colour to the player profiles and gave the Who's Who its unique selling point.  This was forced in part by circumstance, with a change of publisher during the close season disrupting the normal process of gathering in forms filled in by the players themselves. These gems of trivia were replaced fo

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK We'll Get 'Em in Sequins , by Max Davidson Published by: Wisden Sports Writing What's it about? In short, it is the story of the evolution of manliness and masculinity written by an author with a fascination for bravery and chivalry in sport and an astute observer of human behaviour. What counts as manliness is, of course, quite subjective and author Max Davidson is open-minded enough to accept all manner of interpretations of what makes a man.  But when he watched Darren Gough, a fast bowler with the heart of a lion, wearing make-up and spangled tops to win Strictly Come Dancing, sharing a stage with "gay prima donnas, weeping women and superannuated comedians" and saw an England cricket captain, Michael Vaughan, break down in tears as he announced his resignation, he clearly felt that conventions were being challenged enough to start asking a few probing questions. What Gough and Vaughan had in common is

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK CMJ: A Cricketing Life , by Christopher Martin-Jenkins Published by: Simon & Schuster WHAT'S IT ABOUT? Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the sagely doyen of the Test match radio commentary box and the senior voice of the cricketing press, is far too polite to share every opinion he might have formed about his many colleagues over his career, even for the sake of selling extra copies of his forthcoming autobiography. So don’t expect to find any hatchet jobs within the pages of CMJ: A Cricketing Life (Simon & Schuster), which will be in the shops from Thursday of next week (April 12). Nonetheless, the serialisation of the book in The Times has some interesting if carefully worded observations about his co-commentators, some from years long gone but others of more recent vintage. Fred Trueman, he said “like his fellow Yorkshireman, Geoffrey Boycott, could labour a point” while Trevor Bailey “was quite vague and imprecise when it came to the past.”

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike , by William Fotheringham Published by: Yellow Jersey WHAT'S IT ABOUT? Lance Armstrong may have won more Tours de France than Eddy Merckx -- seven against five -- but consider this: between 1961 and 1978, the Belgian rider known as the Cannibal won 525 races, including the Giro d’Italia four times and and three world championships, in addition to his four straight Tour de France wins between 1969 and 1972, with another in 1974. No cyclist has ever won more races in a career, which set Merckx apart from the rest in some minds as verging on mad. Armstrong would save himself for the big events, basing his season on being at his peak at the right moments.  Merckx seemed to want to be at his peak every time he rode. He had an addiction to winning, so consuming that at the height of his powers he won the equivalent of a race every week for six years.  In his most prolific season, he won 54 races, a total never surpassed.  He hold

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK The Spirit of the Game: How Sport Made the Modern World   by Mihir Bose Published by: Constable What’s it about? In seeking to answer the question of how sport did help shape the modern world, the author has produced a sweeping history of sport in the modern world from its idealistic beginnings to the massively commercial present. It is particularly relevant in an Olympic year, particularly in the year of an Olympics in Britain, since Bose begins his exploration of the sporting spirit with the advance of the modern Olympic movement as a phenomenon rooted in what its acknowledged founder, Pierre de Coubertin, cherished as an English virtue. De Coubertin, a French nobleman, drew his inspiration from an English novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a book that paid homage to Rugby School and its headmaster, Thomas Arnold, whose beliefs in manliness and gentlemanly conduct and the health benefits of an outdoor life were set in a sporting context. Coubertin used t

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK Tied Up With Notts   by Colin Slater Published by: Reid Publishing WHAT'S IT ABOUT? Few football stories in the last couple of years have been quite so bizarre or riveting as the tale of Notts County, Sven-Goran Eriksson and the Middle Eastern millions that never were. And few individuals have been quite so well placed to describe it all as Colin Slater , the veteran BBC Radio Nottingham journalist who has been the station’s Notts County man ever since it was launched, some 44 years ago. In fact, Slater’s association with Notts goes back even further. As a football reporter with the long-defunct Nottingham Evening News, he took his seat in the press box at Meadow Lane for the first time in August 1959.  There began a professional and personal relationship with the world’s oldest football league club that now spans 53 years, more than a third of its history. No one, therefore, is better qualified to put in perspective not just the squalid, r

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK The Didi Man: My Love Affair with Liverpool Published by: Headline (Hardcover) WHAT’S IT ABOUT? If Luis Suarez had only asked, a little advice from Dietmar Hamann could have spared the Uruguayan a lot of trouble. The German international midfielder spent seven years on Merseyside, during which, quite apart from playing a major role in Liverpool’s epic triumph in the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul, he demonstrated everything that is correct about how a foreign player in England should conduct himself. Intelligent and eloquent, even in a language not his own, Hamann won universal respect in the Premier League and particular affection among the Liverpool fans not least because of the evolution of his accent.  Just as the Dane, Jan Molby, seemed gradually to turn into a pukka Koppite, so Hamann appeared to learn his English from Jamie Carragher.  By the time he left, in 2006, he was calling himself the world's "only German Scouser".

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977 Published by Elliott and Thompson What’s it about? The Swinging Sixties may have been notable for free love and psychedelic drugs and a new hedonistic pop culture but for the majority the Britain of 1967 was still essentially conventional and conservative, especially among its professional middle classes. This was particularly true of cricket, which clung to the established demarcation lines of the class system as stubbornly as any area of society.  Until 1962, the annual match between Gentlemen and Players -- identifiable on scorecards by the position of their initials, before or after the surname – was still contested.  The fixture was a throwback to the kind of distinctions that set apart officers and the other ranks and domestic staff (downstairs) from their masters (upstairs) and the establishment cliques that ran cricket were not minded to challenge the traditional sociological

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK Up Pohnpei: A quest to reclaim the soul of football by leading the world's ultimate underdogs to glory Published by: Profile Books (Hardcover] What’s it about? Football journalist Paul Watson and his film-maker pal Matt Conrad decide late one evening in Watson’s London flat to become international footballers, an unlikely ambition for two lads in their early 20s with no professional experience but one they think they can fulfil if they first identify the world‘s worst national team. Research leads them to Pohnpei , one of a group of islands in the Pacific known as Micronesia, about 1800 miles north of Australia. The team is ranked 220 in the world, its last known result is a 16-1 defeat to Guam, after which the coach quit and the team effectively disbanded. The idea runs into a snag when they discover they will need to live on the island for five years before they become eligible to play. So they offer instead to become coach and assistant coach, a

New in Football Books All on Red: Ten Years at Anfield - A Liverpool fan's dream job At first glance, All On Red might seem like just another offering from a football fan who fancies himself as a writer but Frank Gamble’s take on life as a Liverpool supporter comes from a slightly different perspective. For a decade from 1979, Gamble was a particularly privileged fan, mixing work and pleasure as lottery sales manager of the club’s Development Association. It was a decade in which Liverpool won six League titles, two European Cups, four League Cups and one FA Cup.  For Gamble, the experience of being behind the scenes at this time was unforgettable.  There were plenty of fans who shared his love for the club but few who had been asked to share their opinions with Joe Fagan, Bob Paisley and Roy Evans in the famous 'boot room'. That happened to Gamble after one big European night at Anfield when, searching for his boss, commercial director Ken Addison, he stumbled acr

FOOTBALL BOOKS Clough: Confidential Given that everyone in football of a certain vintage seems to have a Brian Clough story to recall it is not surprising that there have been around 20 books written about the late former Derby County and Nottingham Forest manager. From the first biography, penned by broadcaster Tony Francis in 1987, to the latest -- and certainly longest -- account of his life and career, exhaustively researched and painstakingly documented by Jonathan Wilson , Clough has remained an enduring source of fascination. Wilson manages to explode a few anecdotal myths in his 566-page tour de force but it is hard to imagine that the appetite for Brian Clough stories, apocryphal or otherwise, will ever be sated. Midlands football writer Dave Armitage found that to be the case when he assembled 150 gems gleaned from press room colleagues and a host of figures from within the game under the imaginative title 150 BC . It was a collection of amusing, amazing and

The rivalry between Celtic and Rangers has seldom been less than intense since they first squared up to one another on May 28th, 1888.  Explosions of hatred between opposing supporters have been commonplace but the 2010-11 season will be remembered as particularly poisonous. It was a season in which Celtic fans protested against the poppy, in which Celtic’s continuous complaints against referees led the officials to go on strike, in which Uefa fined Rangers for sectarian chanting and a Celtic fan was jailed for racially abusing the Rangers player, El-Hadji Diouf. It was a season in which an Old Firm game of three red cards, 13 yellows and 34 arrests inside Celtic Park ended with rival managers Ally McCoist and Neil Lennon having to be dragged apart but which then sank to even lower depths as death threats were made against Celtic boss Lennon, who received bullets and explosives in the post.  Lennon was subsequently attacked by a Hearts supporter on the touchline during a televis

Recommended in football books During the 1870s and 80s, when he appeared in a record nine FA Cup finals for Wanderers and Old Etonians, Arthur Kinnaird was almost as colossal a figure in football as W G Grace had become in cricket. There were even physical similarities.  Grace was easily identified by his ‘yeoman figure and shaggy beard’ -- the precise words used by the editor of Athletic News to describe Kinnaird. And just as Grace had his trademark yellow and red cricket cap, Kinnaird’s white trousers and blue and white quartered cap made him easy to pick out on the football field. But where the life of Dr Grace, and his importance in the development and popularity of cricket, has been documented many times, the role of Kinnaird -- he inherited the title of Lord Kinnaird in 1887 -- was less well researched until sports historian Andy Mitchell decided to investigate. Yet quite apart from being a considerable player in his day -- he has been described as football’s ‘first s

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