Sport & Fitness

‘The Best of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly’ (English Heritage, £16.99)

Here are some of the titles that did not make the shortlist for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award: ‘Rio: My Story’; ‘Steven Gerrard: For Club and Country’; ‘Robbo: My Autobiography’; ‘Ashley Cole: My Defence’; ‘Alan Shearer: Captain Fantastic’; ‘Totally Frank: The Autobiography of Frank Lampard’; ‘Wayne Rooney: My Story So Far’; ‘Shane Warne: My Illustrated Career’; ‘Andrew Strauss: Coming into Play’.

Surprised? Of course not. This year has seen sports publishing slump to a level of staggering banality. Indeed, it has slipped back almost 20 years, to the era before Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch’ and Pete Davies’ ‘All Played Out’ made literary sportswriting both respectable and fashionable. Feature continues

Why? First, the desire to profit from England’s Ashes triumph. The trend for moderately revealing first-hand accounts bottomed out when Andrew Flintoff followed up his best-selling autobiography with ‘Freddie: My World’ (Hodder, £18.99) – in which the ‘author’ thanks his ghost ‘for managing accurately to convey in writing what I told him over a coffee or two’.

Second, the bizarre conviction among publishers that England were going to win the World Cup. This led to virtually all Sven’s key men signing up, with perhaps the only titles not considered being ‘Peter Crouch: Walking Tall’ and ‘Owen Hargreaves: Kraut You Go’. The inevitable consequence was Wayne Rooney’s preposterous £5 million five-book deal with HarperCollins, the striker claiming that ‘there will be lots of things to read about’. Unfortunately, as ghost Hunter Davies later revealed, there were very few things to write about.

For the second year running, cricket is missing from the six books shortlisted for what is jocularly known as the Bookie’s Prize, while football has a single representative aiming to repeat Gary Imlach’s success of 12 months ago when the outstanding ‘My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes’ got the nod from a judging panel including broadcasters and journalists John Inverdale, Danny Kelly and Hugh McIlvanney. This year’s contender is Gianluca Vialli and Gabriele Marcotti’s ‘The Italian Job’ (Bantam, £17.99), a perceptive study of tactics, techniques and footballing cultures. ‘In England football is played with the heart, in Italy football is played with the brains,’ the pair write after talking to managers and coaches in both countries. Read it in conjunction with John Foot’s ‘Calcio’ (4th Estate, £15), updated to include the recent corruption scandal, and you’ll gain an insight into the psyche of a football-mad nation.

Boxing and cycling have been the subjects of five previous William Hill winners, and they’re strongly represented on the latest list with Geoffrey Ward’s ‘Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson’ (Pimlico, £8.99) and Matt Rendell’s ‘The Death of Marco Pantani’ (Weidenfeld, £16.99). Ward’s book is the companion to a documentary of the same name (as yet unseen in the UK) which traces the flamboyant lifestyle of the world’s first black heavyweight champion. Ward doesn’t defend Johnson’s vices, just as Rendell avoids siding with Pantani in his compelling investigation into the death from cocaine poisoning of the charismatic, piratical 1998 Tour de France winner – though he does paint the sport itself as the villain.