The Sports Bookshelf

Finding a publisher for a sports book idea that does not immediately guarantee ringing tills or multiple internet sales has seldom been tougher, which is why fans of the more esoteric -- or at least less mainstream -- contributions to the genre should be grateful for the work of the Cheltenham-based outfit, SportsBooks. Formed in 1995 by former Daily Express athletics correspondent Randall Northam, the original purpose of SportsBooks was to publish the yearbook of the Association of Track and Field Statisticians, of which Athletics 2010 is the latest edition. But it grew to become much more, each year giving a chance to titles that would not necessarily appeal to mass-market audiences but which nonetheless warrant a place on the bookstore shelves, books that in their own view “deserve to be out in the marketplace.” The acquisition of the Nationwide Football Annual (formerly the News of the World Annual and the world’s oldest football book) has helped SportsBooks maintain this re

Who is the most expensive signing in the history of the Premier League?  Correct. Robinho at £32.5 million, signed in September 2008 from Real Madrid and symbolic of the age of excess into which Manchester City had been drawn by the arrival of Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi as a force in English football. But is he really the costliest player, in relative terms, compared with those blessed -- or otherwise -- with the label previously? City may be the richest club in the world and their spending may have soared past £300 million but, in real terms, they have some way to go before they can be regarded as the biggest spenders in the Premier League. So say the authors of a fascinating analysis of transfer spending since English football was elevated to a new financial status when the Premier League was born in 1992. Using an innovative formula that converts transfer fees from any year to current values, Pay As You Play: The True Price of Success in the Premier League Era  offers a wh

Part Four -- Five from the Turf Ruby: The Autobiography Not unusually, Ruby Walsh is injured. The Irishman, winner of two Grand Nationals and two Cheltenham Gold Cups, has suffered 12 breaks or dislocations in his career. At different times, the occupational hazards associated with his sport have left him with an ankle, a leg, both hips, both shoulders, his left arm, both wrists, a collarbone and several vertebrae effectively in bits. For good measure, he had to have his spleen removed in 2008 after a horse kicked him in the stomach. At the moment, the tibia and fibula in his right leg are undergoing repairs. But Walsh is philosophical. He points out in this honest and revealing life story, co-written with Irish journalist Malachy Clerkin, that you can’t ride half-ton horses at 50kph and expect not to get injured. But he has also ridden more winners at the Cheltenham Festival than any other jockey in history.  He describes many of these, with fascinating insights into riding tact

Part Three -- An Independent selection If you are looking for gift ideas for a sports-loving reader in your life, don’t just take The Sports Bookshelf’s word for which titles are likely to be well received from the choices on offer this Christmas. At this time of year, book suggestions make popular subject matter for newspaper columnists.  For instance, UK daily The Independent devoted a whole section to the best books for Christmas across a range of genres, with sport put in the spotlight by Chris Maume. Maume is intrigued by the idea, advanced by Mathew Syed of The Times in Bounce: How Champions are Made  (Fourth Estate) that high achievement in sport is less down to God-given talent than sheer hard work.  “See that David Beckham? That could have been me,” Maume muses. “I could have become the most famous footballer in the world – if I'd put in 10,000 hours of motivated, high-quality practice.” He is also impressed with the ever-insightful Simon Barnes -- another Tim

England might not find the subject too palatable right now but once the disappointment of failing to land the right to host the 2018 World Cup has worn off there will be an inevitable thirst for knowledge about football in the nation that did emerge from the FIFA vote as the winner, Russia. There is probably nowhere better to start than the highly regarded Football Dynamo: Modern Russia and the People’s Game , written by the English-born, Moscow-based journalist Marc Bennetts. It does not paint an edifying picture. Published in 2008, Football Dynamo makes no attempt to romanticise football in Russia, even though Bennetts finds much to admire about it. There is a strong focus on the problems that beset the game in Russia, with stories of corruption, political interference, violence, racism and financial shenanigans.  We learn that corruption is so widespread as to be seen as “just another factor, like home advantage and recent form” in deciding games. Bennetts argues that there

A sporting life with a darker side has again found favour with the judging panel for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, who have awarded the richest prize for sports writing to the ex-England and British Lions rugby star Brian Moore. The former hooker, known as ‘Pit Bull’ in his playing days in the 1990s, scooped the £22,000 award for his harrowing, soul-baring autobiography Beware of the Dog: Rugby's Hardman Reveals All. Two years ago, the William Hill judges went for former England cricketer Marcus Trescothick’s autobiography, Coming Back to Me , which broke new ground in the sports book genre by discussing the depression that ended the Somerset batsman’s international career. Moore’s memoirs are equally raw and revealing, in the most deeply personal and painful sense, bringing to light for the first time the sexual abuse he suffered as a boy at the hands of a trusted friend of his adoptive parents. Beware of the Dog beat off competition from a strong field that i

Part Two -- A Quintet on Cricket Between now and December 25th, The Sports Bookshelf will provide a regular selection of sports books that might tickle your fancy or interest a son, daughter, friend or partner as you weigh up what to put under the tree this Christmas.  Click on the title or the picture to buy securely from Amazon. Thanks, Johnners: An Affectionate Tribute to a Broadcasting Legend Brian Johnston died in 1994 but to scores of Test Match Special listeners it is his name that comes to mind at the mention of TMS, even now.  Jonathan Agnew salutes his unique place in the history of the BBC’s iconic cricket commentary show in a warm and witty homage to a man alongside whom he worked for only three years but whose informal, mischievous style made Agnew the broadcaster he is today.  Those three precious years also produced the most famous moment in TMS history when Agnew’s description of the way Ian Botham “didn’t quite get his leg over” as he was dismissed ‘hit-wicket’

Former England cricketer Marcus Trescothick has been awarded the Making a Difference award at the Mind Mental Health Media Awards 2010 in recognition of his decision to write and speak publicly about his personal experience of depression.  The awards by Britain’s leading mental health charity identify the most effective portrayals of mental distress and reporting of mental health in broadcast and new media.  The Making a Difference award is presented to someone who has made a genuine impact on the way that mental health is viewed. Trescothick, who continues to play cricket as captain of Somerset, was recognised for his involvement with the BBC’s Inside Sport documentary investigating depression amongst sportsmen, and for his candid autobiography Coming Back To Me , detailing what it is like to live with the condition. He retired from international cricket because of his illness but has made efforts to raise awareness of mental health problems in the media, helping bring mental

David Frith has probably put too many backs up and exposed too many raw truths to be held in quite the same affection among cricket writers as, say, Neville Cardus, or John Arlott.  His love for the game runs no less deep; indeed, his life has been one of slavish devotion to the game. Yet there has rarely been a mist of sentimentality obscuring his view. As he explains in his preface to this collection of his writings, Frith’s ambition was “to share the pleasure and excitement as well as the recurring indignation at the bruises inflicted on cricket by the greedy and uncaring”. The pieces in Frith on Cricket , chosen by the author, include some extracts from 30 or more books but draw heavily from his magazine and newspaper writing, much of which will have been long forgotten. The advantage this provides lies not only in offering Frith’s admirers access to work with which they may not be familiar but also in the unpolished honesty of the work, written under the pressure of dead

Sebastian Vettel’s timing could not have been better.  With the Formula One drivers’ championship still open to four contenders as the cars lined up on the grid for the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi, Vettel produced the perfect drive at the perfect moment. With pre-race points leader Fernando Alonso unable to finish in the first four, which would have denied Vettel the title, the 23-year-old German became the youngest F1 champion, his victory putting him in front for the only time in the championship. By consensus, he drove a superb race.  But did he find himself in the zone?  It is not a phrase often recognised as carrying profound meaning.  Indeed, in most sports it would convey nothing more than a sense of focus or concentration, a basic prerequisite to success. In motor racing, however, to be in the zone is to reach an almost mystical place, or a state of mind in any event, in which the driver and car effectively become one entity, the occupant of the cockpit as m

Part One -- Five on Football Between now and December 25th, The Sports Bookshelf will provide a regular selection of sports books that might tickle your fancy or interest a son, daughter, friend or partner as you weigh up what to put under the tree this Christmas.  Click on the title or the picture to buy securely from Amazon. John Giles: A Football Man - My Autobiography Johnny Giles, brilliant midfield craftsman of the Don Revie era at Leeds United, hits back at what he considers the myth of ‘Dirty Leeds’, suggesting that the image of the club has been tainted by repeated distortions of the truth, the worst of which have come about since David Peace’s fact-into-fiction account, The Damned United, was turned into a film, which Giles described as “a misinterpretation of the misinterpretation of the book”.  Those Leeds supporters of a certain age who have to scratch their heads to remember Giles as the sly psychopath of recent reinvention will see this as a welcome revision.

Here’s an interesting poser.  Were you to canvass the opinions of 100 of the greatest players in cricket history, from the late Sir Alec Bedser to Shane Warne, and ask them to name which players from the last 100 years or so would merit selection for an all-time world XI, which England cricketer do you suppose would win the most votes? The answer might surprise you a little, as it possibly did journalist Richard Sydenham, who has had the patience and staying power to track down 100 players willing to name their best XI and then painstakingly record and classify their choices in a new book. In a League of Their Own: 100 Cricket Legends Select Their World XI lists 108 different nominees for places in these 100 fantasy elites, of whom 25 were England players.  Only Australia, with 30, had a stronger representation. So which of the 25 was the most popular choice?  Ian Botham? Geoffrey Boycott? Or, going back a little further, perhaps Len Hutton? In fact, it was none of those.  Ne

There is a lot to be said for a good collaborator, which may explain why Open , the soul-baring autobiography of American tennis star Andre Agassi, is in line for a second award in Britain. Open , which was voted Best Biography’ at the British Sports Book awards in March, has made the shortlist of six for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2010. It is a strong story, one in which Agassi confesses not only to using the recreational drug, crystal meth, and lying about it to avoid being banned from his sport, but to hating tennis after being forced into it by a controlling father, so much so that he likened much of his early life and career to being imprisoned in an existence over which he had no control. Agassi chose his own ‘ghost’ but none of the tennis writers of his acquaintance fitted the bill, apparently.  Instead, he contacted John Moehringer Jnr, better known by his byline, JR Moehringer, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist whose own memoir about growing up fatherles

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&

Having broken Australia’s stranglehold on the Ashes with two consecutive home wins, England’s cricketers will board the long flight Down Under this Friday confident they can return in the New Year with the famous urn still in their possession. Much newspaper space will be given to assessing the relative strengths of the rival nations between now and the first Test in Brisbane on November 25th but in terms of raw statistical history England’s prospects are easily measured. Based on results in the 16 Ashes series completed in Australia since the war, England’s chance is one in four. Four wins in 16 attempts -- an uncomfortable record that demonstrates why the title chosen for Huw Turbervill’s history of England’s post-War adventures in Australia is only too apt. The Toughest Tour , published on October 26th by Aurum Press , charts the story of all 16 Ashes series -- as well as the extra non-Ashes Tests of 1979-80 -- through the eyes of those who took part. As is inevitably the