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Find out moreRead more about your favourite sports or sportsmen and women with a unique perspective on their careers from the comfort of your sofa with this range of recommended books. Whether you’re a football fan, rugby reveller or fishing follower, we have a great read for you!
With the World Cup taking place on the African continent this year Steve Bloomfield analyses why the game plays such an important role in today’s Africa and why they are turning out such a huge amount of world class players. A great book for setting the scene for this year's World Cup.
A fascinating book that traces the development of football in Africa, finding out what makes African football unique and examining how the game fits into the social and political life of the continent.
Well, World Cup fever is on us once again and here Graham McColl takes a look at the possible how’s and why’s of certain teams winning the coveted cup. He looks at all the various factors that go in to making that winning team from tactics to pure luck and with all this in mind he looks at the qualifying teams for the 2010 competition.
Winner of the Best New Writer category of the British Sports Book Awards 2011. Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2010. Matthew Syed - an award-winning Times columnist and three-time Commonwealth table-tennis champion - reveals what really lies behind world-beating achievement in sport, and other walks of life besides.
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2010. From an amateur footballer working on a bomb disposal unit in Liverpool, to celebrated Manchester City goalkeeper adored by thousands, Catrine Clay charts Trautmann's conversion from Hitler Youth star to all-England football hero, mirroring Europe's own journey through the horrors of war to a fragile post-war peace.
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2010. Blood Knots is about angling, about great fish caught and lost, but it is also about friendship, honour and coming of age.
Shortlisted in the Best Autobiography category of the British Sports Book Awards 2011. Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2010. This is not the story of a celebrity sportsman. It's not the story of a life covered in glory with its attendant cavalcade of famous friends, easy wins and glamorous encounters. Errol Christie may have been one of the most promising British boxers of his generation a Fight Night poster boy, captain of the England boxing team, English and European champion, and a cocky, Ali-esque dancer with a reputation for devastating early knockouts but this is not that story. This is a story about fighting. Coventry in the dying days of the Seventies was a tough place to grow up especially if you were poor and black. At the same time as the young Errol Christie was raising the flag in the ring, his fists were seeing off skinhead tormentors and NF bootboys on the streets. Britain was sickening from a vicious racial divide, and even when the big time turned up Errol soon discovered that a black boxer who refused to play by the white rules would never be tolerated. In 1985, after a string of professional knockouts, Errol faced Mark Kaylor in a brutal bout that tore open the country's simmering racial enmities. In the eighth round he went down and stayed down, the roar of the hard right in his ears. But the years that followed would see Errol square up against a far tougher adversary as he found himself out in the cold, struggling to get by, and alone with only his own shattered confidence and no place to hide.
A must for all football fans as the Sky Sports presenter shares anecdotes and stories about his time covering the football, his own highs and lows and his sharing of the pleasure and pain with all the other football fanatics out there.
December 2009 Book of the Month. Funny how the world has changed in less than 100 years. Today, it is likely that we would know every aspect Ronnie Poulton-Palmer's life - his family background, where he went to school, his social life, his relationships, where he played, how he played. He would be all over the media and feted by the paparazzi. He would be sponsored by Banks, deodorants, after-shaves and sports goods companies. Probably, he would have a multi-million pound contract to play rugby in France. Instead, he scored four tries in his last game for England in 1914 and gave his life for his country in 1915. Even if you have nor heard of Ronnie Poulton-Palmer, even if you are not particularly keen on Rugby, you should read this book. It evokes a time and a long-lost sense of values and behavioural code - as well as the life of a quite extraordinary man whose story deserves to be told.
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 29 October 2009. In Lynne Truss’s varied career in journalism her four years spent as a sports columnist perhaps seemed the most unlikely but she made a success of those four years and here she recalls some of the highs and lows with hilarity and charm.
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2009. A fascinating book that traces the development of footbal in Africa, finding out what makes African football unique and examining how the game fits into the social and political life of the continent.
Not only have the players got more money and celebrity over the past thirty years but football managers now find themselves in the lime light more and more. This book is full of some brilliant and funny anecdotes along with profiles of some of the more fascinating and entertaining managers and a look at just how much the job has changed over the years. An entertaining and witty read for all football fans.
They are role models, heroes, spokespeople for major brands, they get millions in sponsorship, their personal lives are plastered over the gossip columns, they are at the top of their professions and love them or hate them, they’re all over our newspapers, TVs, PCs and radios. This section has everything the armchair enthusiast could wish for. Myth-busting biographies (Beware of the Dog by Brian Moore), detailed histories (A History of Football in 100 Objects by Gavin Mortimer), personal accounts of huge moments (Black White & Gold by Kelly Holmes), and atmospheric tributes to beloved games (A Last English Summer by Duncan Hamilton. This is the inside track on the lives, loves, losses and victories of some of the world’s most physically talented people, and the games they love to play.
Get into your favourite armchair, plump up the cushions, have a nice cup of tea and dive in. Just make sure you don’t pull a muscle!