The Sports Bookshelf

West Indies fast bowling legend opens up to Richard Sydenham What he really thinks of ex-teammates and opponents Inside story of his battles with Steve Waugh The good and bad sides of Brian Lara Jon Culley Amid the debate over the rights or wrongs of the send-off salute that the West Indian cricketer Marlon Samuels gave England's Ben Stokes during the second Test match in Grenada, I noticed something that once would have caused jaws to drop in astonishment...a comment from Curtly Ambrose. The former fast bowler, one of the greats of West Indies cricket and the scourge of English batsmen for more than a decade after he was first unleashed upon them in 1988, famously observed what amounted to a vow of silence with the media for virtually his entire career. His steadfast refusal to offer a quotable comment, let alone grant interviews, became his trademark.  Requests, it is said, were politely declined and greeted with five words: 'Curtly talks to no man!' B

New book studies a history of mutually beneficial co-existence What football owes to Sky and Sky owes to football How one of game's great traditions came about to suit the press Why women's game should feel let down by football and the media As Sky were committing themselves to paying £4.2 billion as their share of the latest record-breaking deal to show the Premier League, for every armchair football fan relishing the prospect of even more world-class players flooding to these shores for their entertainment, there were others wondering how much more perversion of the game's traditions might result from television's ever-tightening grip. Yet, as Roger Domeneghetti reveals in his fascinating new book, From the Back Page to the Front Room , football has been bowing to the wishes of the media since the century before last. Take the 3pm Saturday afternoon kick-off, possibly the most cherished of all the traditions, the tinkering with which has been

Cricket festivals were once as much a part of the English sporting summer as Test matches, Wimbledon and the Epsom Derby.    They were the chance for the cricket counties to venture from their metropolitan headquarters into the shires, where club grounds would dress themselves up to welcome the stars of the county and international circuits. Chris Arnot, author of the wonderfully nostalgic Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds , has now written an equally engaging tour of the country's rich cricket heritage that puts the spotlight on that cherished era. In his introduction to Britain's Lost Cricket Festivals , the Warwickshire-based journalist notes that as recently as 1961 there were 64 cricket festivals in the county fixture schedule, an average of three per county. By 2001 this had dwindled to 16; today there are fewer still.  Cheltenham and Scarborough continue, and there has been a revival of county cricket in Chesterfield, which Derbyshire deserted between 1998 and

When cricket writer Chris Waters delivered the manuscript for Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography to his publisher three years ago, he told friends his first book would also be his last, echoing the words of countless writers before him. The journey from first thoughts to final page can be long and arduous, so grueling sometimes that many vow never to go there again. A modest man, not inclined to blow his own trumpet, Waters wasn't sure whether he had done a good job or otherwise.  The reviews, however, were highly complimentary. Indeed, Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography won a hat-trick of awards: Wisden Book of the Year, MCC/Cricket Society Book of the Year and British Sports Book Awards Cricket Book of the Year. The thousands of readers who shared the enthusiasm of the award judges will be delighted to learn that Trueman was not his last book.  The second is due out next month. 10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat is prob

The Real Jeeves: The Cricketer Who Gave His Life for His Country and His Name to a Legend , by Brian Halford By conservative estimates, the Battle of the Somme claimed the lives of more than one million soldiers, to be remembered as one of the great tactical mistakes in the history of warfare, its name becoming a byword for pointless, indiscriminate slaughter. Among them was a cricketer whose name would become famous, not for anything that happened in the horror of the trenches but because of a fictional character in a series of comic novels that are still read - and indeed adapted for stage and television -- to this day. Jeeves was the name chosen for the valet devised by the author P G Wodehouse to act as a foil for his comic lead, Bertie Wooster, in a series of novels and short stories, making his first appearance (without meeting Wooster, as it happens) in Extricating Young Gussie, which was published in the United States in September 1915 in The Saturday Evening Post. W

Julie Ryan was only a toddler when her father's football career was drawing to a close, too young to know anything about the goalscoring feats that made him a favourite with fans at Millwall, Brighton and Gillingham during the post-War boom years of the 1950s. But as she grew up it became clear that the story of John Shepherd, who scored 121 goals in his nine seasons in the professional game, was a particularly exceptional one. Barely 18 months before making an extraordinary Millwall debut in which he scored four times, Shepherd had been admitted to hospital in Cornwall suffering from poliomyletis, a dreaded disease of childhood and adolescence that claimed thousands of victims in the first half of the last century. Shepherd, who contracted the paralysing illness while on national service with the RAF, lost all feeling in his left foot and doctors warned him he might never walk again, let alone realise his dream of professional football. The dark days spent in an isolat

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

COMING SOON: Unbelievable - From Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold The autobiography of Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis It is a measure of the essential modesty of Olympic golden girl Jessica Ennis that she was reluctant to commit to telling her life story before London 2012 because she was not sure that she had done enough to warrant it. The idea was discussed earlier this year, when she asked Rick Broadbent, the athletics writer who had ghosted her column in The Times since 2009, if he would be willing to work with her, only to decide that she did not want to blur her focus on her ultimate goal. "We talked about it but she was always in two minds," Broadbent told The Sports Bookshelf. "She didn't want to do it because, in her mind, she had not really achieved anything, so the project was put on hold." Ennis had been European and World heptathlon champion but only Olympic gold would satisfy her definition of achievement and i

David McVay's professional football career spanned only nine seasons, during which time the imprint he left on the game was such that the title he chose when he was encouraged to publish the journal he kept during part of that time seemed entirely apt.   Diary of a Football Nobody , first published in 2003, was exactly as described: a collection of daily reflections, reproduced exactly as they were written at the time, on life as a player of modest ability plying his trade with a club associated mostly with modest attainment, in his case Notts County, the world's oldest football league club, during the 1970s. McVay gave up keeping the diary, he recalls, early in 1976, thanks to "a lager-logged brain and an incurable bout of apathy" and though he had the foresight to stow his ramblings in a drawer rather than bin them, it was not in any expectation of revealing them to a wider world. Yet for the next couple of weeks they are being not only revisited but broug