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

As first assignments go, it wasn't a bad one.  Sports journalist Chris Brereton, newly recruited by publishers Trinity Mirror Sports Media and still readjusting to life back in the UK after a year in Thailand, was asked if he fancied ghosting an autobiography.  He had never written a book before but when he learned that the subject was footballer Fabrice Muamba, there was only going to be one answer.   The schedule set out was almost impossible -- it was already August and the book was due in the shops in early November -- yet the Muamba story, of the young Bolton Wanderers player who collapsed on the field during a match at Tottenham Hotspur and was effectively brought back from the dead, was too good to turn down. "From a journalist's point of view it has been the story of 2012," Brereton said. "I had been working on the Bangkok Post but the impact of Fabrice's story was just as big over there. "The English Premier League is massive in Thaila

The sports book market has a Super Thursday of its own this week, with the memoirs of three Olympic superstars launching simultaneously on November 8, when autobiographies of Jessica Ennis, Bradley Wiggins and Lord Coe will be competing for the biggest display stands at bookstores up and down the land. Their appearance will sound the starting gun on the pre-Christmas sales rush if it is not already under way.  Shelves are groaning a little more every day now with the release of new titles. None more so, literally, than those stacked with the latest version of David Miller's mammoth Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC, Athens to London, 1894-2012, published by Mainstream. This is the third - arguably the fourth - edition of the veteran journalist Miller's unrivaled tome, which first appeared in 2003 to mark the return of the Games to Athens in 2004, was updated ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2007 and has been further revised to include London 2012. Publ