The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
What a difference a manager makes
Sex wars, celebrity owners and Sarina Wiegman – all hit the page in sports writing at its punchiest
The sporting year began with the English men crashing out of the Football World Cup quarter-finals, their rugby counterparts following suit in their semifinal, and in between, the footballing Lionesses being pipped to glory by crisis-laden Spain. Europe overcame America in the Ryder Cup, and Max Verstappen increased his dominance, rather than being pegged back, in Formula One.
On the page, 2023 was a little less dramatic. One trend was for incisive books on the rise of women’s sport – not least the influence of Sarina Wiegman, the Dutch coach of the Lionesses, whose What It Takes (HarperCollins, £22) offered a guide to leadership. It was more coaching manual than tell-all – or indeed tell-almost-anythingpersonal – but it did furnish some insights on this famously guarded coach’s approach to the game.
The debates about gender issues have only become more contentious in women’s sports. This year, South African runner Caster Semenya’s The Race to Be Myself (Merky, £20) dealt with the rancour surrounding her own achievements and testosterone levels, while retired swimmer Sharron Davies’s Unfair Play (Forum, £20) examined the impact that gender self-identification is having on natal female athletes.
But these weren’t the only sporting controversies to receive indepth treatment. Sam Peters’s Concussed: Sport’s Uncomfortable Truth (Allen & Unwin, £20) looked forensically into the costs of competing at the highest level. Peters is fighting to change rugby’s approach to concussions, an ever-worsening problem as players – and on-field collisions – grow ever heavier.
Politics and history, in combination, were another common theme; Anthony Broxton’s Hope and Glory: Rugby League in Thatcher’s Britain (Pitch, £25) among several books to ground a sport in its societal context. See also Jeff
Jones’s Stars and Scars: The Story of Jewish Boxing in London (Amberley, £18.99), an admirably well researched look at the Jewish fighters who helped to shape the sport, and Inshallah United: A Story of Faith and Football (HarperNorth, £16.99) by Nooruddean Choudry, a personal memoir about his love of Manchester United – a different sort of faith from that of his Pakistani family.
The romance of the beautiful game inspired two tales of unlikely rejuvenations. Watford Forever (Viking, £22), by John Preston and Elton John, and Tinseltown: Hollywood and the Beautiful Game – a Match Made in Wrexham (Headline, £22), by Ian Herbert. Both told cheering stories of the impact of celebrity owners on unfashionable clubs – albeit ones as distant in space and several decades apart in time as Watford and Wrexham are.
A different sort of happy ending was told by Duncan Hamilton in Answered Prayers: England and the 1966 World Cup (Riverrun, £25), about Alf Ramsey’s march to glory and the subsequent – often muted – later lives of both manager and squad. Notions of posterity and the perils of post-competition obscurity were also central to Ned Boulting’s excellent 1923:
The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession (Bloomsbury, £18.99), born as much of a stir-crazy preoccupation as of the author’s deep-rooted love of cycling.
Back in the world of recent events, the impact of managers was key to a number of the year’s most entertaining books. One was Bazball (Bloomsbury, £22) by Lawrence Booth and Nick Hoult, which detailed the revolution in English cricket brought about by Brendon McCullum; another was Surviving to Drive (Bantam, £20), a swearily quotable account of the hiring, firing and stresses of the Formula One pit lane by Haas team principal Guenther Steiner.
The pick of the autobiographical crop, however, was the sports book of the year: an unorthodox “lost” memoir by former Manchester United goalkeeper Les Sealey, the recovery of which forms the basis of Tim Rich’s On Days Like These (Quercus, £20). It isn’t just a touching tribute: it also offers a rich portrait of the near-unrecognisable world of English football on the precipice of the Premier League – and the vast riches that would change it forever.