TOP 5 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
HAVING whetted the appetite with five of the year’s best sports books (it was numbers ten to six last week), here, with the accompanying roll of drums, are the year’s top five, presented, naturally, in reverse order…
At number five is David Bolchover’s The Greatest Comeback, the story of Béla Guttmann, a man who could justifiably be called football’s first ‘super coach’. However, the tactical abilities which saw him employed by more than twenty clubs during a career that stretched well into his sixties, was only part of his incredible story. His willingness to travel in order to further his football career earned him the nickname “Wandering Jew” (too rarely used in jest), yet his Jewishness is integral to this remarkable and well-researched tale.
4. The Talent Lab by Owen Slot. The turnaround in Great Britain’s Olympic fortunes since Atlanta in 1996 has been nothing short of dramatic. From a miserable return on investment 21 years ago, in 2012, Team GB were third in the medal table; at last year’s Rio Olympics, they took second place. Yet, as Slot shows, it wasn’t as though sport was starved of cash between 19962012.
3. A Clear Blue Sky by Johnny Bairstow and Duncan Hamilton is as far from a statistical re-run of JB’s career to date as you could imagine. Instead, readers are presented with a gripping, page-turning evocation of the human spirit, a story of triumph and lots of sadness in the face of extreme adversity.
2. Like The Beautiful Game? which shone a bright spotlight on domestic football’s darkest corners, revealing its distasteful capacity to attract kleptomaniacal club chairmen and administrators for whom greed and incompetence were a way of life, David Conn does an equally impressive job on a global level in The Fall of the House of FIFA.
Hold the drumroll, cue the trumpets… number one on our list of 2017’s sports books is Redemption by John McAvoy with Mark Turley. The book features one of the best introductions to a sporting title you’re ever likely to read. Within a few paragraphs, you have an empathy with the narrator embarked on a 106 km foot race from London to Brighton after he explains why tackling such distances appeals. “Endurance sport hinges on pain, which is why it attracts a certain type of athlete,” he says. “You begin an event with your fitness and strength, but you finish it only with stubbornness.”
We’ve teamed up with www. sportsbookofthemonth.com and have copies of all ten sports books of the year to give away. To win, visit www.sportsbookofthemonth. com and answer the following question: