The Sports Bookshelf

When Roy Keane's publishers chose this Thursday -- October 9 -- as the date to release the controversial client's new autobiography, did they not know that they were clashing with a certain Kevin Pietersen? If there is one person who could trump Keano for headline-making revelations, then it is KP. Pietersen's first major pre-publication interview appeared in the Daily Telegraph on Monday, prompting just about every national newspaper to clear their pages for the inevitable reaction. The Times have exclusive extracts to the Keane biography, The Second Half, which is ghosted, interestingly, by the Booker prize-winning Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, and give them due prominence. Elsewhere, however, he barely gets a look-in as cricket correspondents and chief sports writers get to grips with KP's revelations and the fall-out, which has already reached levels unprecedented in the long history of cricket books. Keane was helped when a Tesco store in Greater M...

Chris Waters, whose biography of Fred Trueman won three prestigious awards, has scored another hit with his excellent work on another Yorkshire cricketer, Hedley Verity. 10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket’s Greatest Bowling Feat was named Book of the Year by the Cricket Writers’ Club at their annual members’ lunch at the Plaisterers’ Hall in London. The judges were impressed with the skill with which Waters was able recreate the atmosphere around cricket in Verity’s era, the 1930s, and in particular the match against Nottinghamshire at Headingley in July 1932 in which he took all 10 wickets to fall in the visitors’ second innings at a cost of only 10 runs, a world record analysis in first-class cricket that remains unsurpassed. While that great feat of bowling is the book’s centrepiece, Waters revisits Verity's past and takes the story on, beyond the outbreak of war that ended his career to his death in Italy in 1943 from wounds sustained in battle.  It is ...

The autobiography of Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas – the former captain of Wales and the British Lions and the highest-profile sportsman in the UK to come out as gay – is among 15 titles on the longlist for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2014. Thomas’s book Proud , published last month, tells the full story of his struggle with his sexuality, which he kept from his now ex-wife Jemma and teammates through much of his career, and how several times he contemplated taking his own life before deciding to make his homosexuality public in 2009. Biographies and autobiographies dominate the list, from which will be selected the 26th winner of the award, the most valuable and prestigious prize in sports literature. Mike Tyson‘s no-holds-barred Undisputed Truth is among them, alongside Alone , the story of the tragically short life of John Curry, the figure skater who had 20 million Britons glued to their TV sets as he changed the perception of ice skating from marginal sp...

Nottingham Forest and Derby fans have been paying tribute to the memory of Brian Clough in the last few days, 10 years on from his death at the age of 69 on September 20, 2003.   Supporters set aside their differences joined in a minute's applause when the East Midlands rivals met at the City Ground while at Forest's match with Fulham last week, the players entered the field with a guard of honour made up of Forest season ticket holders, all dressed in the green sweatshirt that was the great manager's matchday uniform. Hundreds of Forest fans at the Capital One Cup match against Tottenham wore green sweatshirts provided by the competition sponsors, who are based in Nottingham. Everyone who encountered Cloughie seems to have a favourite story about him, among them the Midlands journalist Dave Armitage, who gathered together 150 of them -- some of his own and a great many shared by others -- in a book cleverly titled 150 BC and had enough left over to follow up wit...

Books that fall into the category of football nostalgia can sometimes become a little tedious, particularly if the author is simply banging on about how the game was better in 'his' time and it is clear that his view of the past comes with a filter for the bad bits. Readers might be forgiven for expecting Matthew Eastley's two-volume offering to be more of the same, a lament for a lost era by a writer who finds it impossible to see any virtue in the football of today. But to suggest that Eastley's look back on the FA Cup finals in the 60s and 70s -- there is another about the 80s on the way -- amounts merely to an outpouring of discontent at the decline of a football institution would do his work an enormous disservice. A corporate journalist by profession, and a lifelong Charlton Athletic fan, Eastley has told the story of two decades of Cup finals not by rehashing the well-worn details of what happened on the field but by revisiting each match through the m...

Kevin Pietersen's autobiography is due out next month, with a promise to reveal the detail of his parting of the ways with the England cricket team, until now shackled by the confidentiality clause that accompanied his dismissal.  Its impending publication has been a long time in the public domain, allowing rival publishers to offer something by way of competition. More often than not, such spoilers are barely worthy of mention, old material rehashed in haste by a writer with no sources of information beyond a pile of newspaper cuttings or, these days, whatever he can turn up on Google. Simon Wilde's book, On Pietersen: The Making of KP, is considerably better than that, being not so much a biography as an appraisal, in the form of a series of essays, by the Sunday Times cricket correspondent, who has reported on Pietersen's career in its entirety, certainly since he first crossed England's radar, and has diligently gone back to many of the coaches and fellow pl...

Sir Alex Ferguson can expect to earn himself another sizeable supplement to his pension when the paperback version of his record-breaking autobiography appears in the shops ready for the Christmas market. The hardback edition was the best selling print book of 2013 with UK outlets, its sales of 803,084 copies in less than 10 weeks beating the Dan Brown novel Inferno. Sales of 115,000 in the first week on the shelves set another record, for the fastest selling non-fiction book, knocking cook book queen Delia Smith off that particular perch. Ferguson would have pocketed at least £1 million from last year's sales alone, even assuming he was on no better than the standard royalty arrangement with his publisher. The former Manchester United manager's personal account of his fall-outs with Roy Keane, David Beckham and other ex-United players provided a major selling point for the book, along with his views on rival managers such as Arsene Wenger. And there is more in th...