The Sports Bookshelf

Bobby Moore: The Man in Full is Biography of the Year Thirty-One Nil is best Football Book Cricket Book award goes to Wounded Tiger Gareth Thomas's Proud is Autobiography of the Year Gareth Thomas, Matt Dickinson, James Montague, Richard Parks, Peter Oborne, Alastair Down, Herbie Sykes, Bill Jones and Anna Krien were recognised for their outstanding contributions to sports literature at the 2015 British Sports Book Awards, sponsored by pen makers Cross. They were the headline winners at a ceremony hosted by broadcaster and former cricketer Jonathan Agnew at Lord's cricket ground in London. Gareth Thomas, the former Wales and British and Irish Lions captain who played both Rugby Union and Rugby League in a glittering career, won the Autobiography of the Year prize for Proud (Ebury Press), written with the help of journalist and author Michael Calvin, which tells the story of how Thomas found the courage to admit to being gay in the macho world of rugby. ...

CYCLING BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2014 The boom in cycling books has been a feature of recent years in the sports books market, their popularity fuelled by a mix of success stories and shame. On the one hand, the likes of Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish, Chris Froome and Chris Hoy have taken British cycling to a new level in terms of achievement on the road and track. On the other, the doping revelations that engulfed seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong have placed cycling at the heart of a scandal unprecedented in the sporting world. The Wiggins autobiography My Time was the biggest selling sports book of 2012, while the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2012 was Tyler Hamilton's The Secret Race , based on the Grand Jury evidence that exposed Armstrong as the biggest drug cheat of all time. The Armstrong story spawned another William Hill contender last year in Seven Deadly Sins , in which journalist David Walsh's detailed his dogged pursuit of...

Headline have revealed the cover for Bend It Like Bullard, the in which Jimmy Bullard, the former Wigan, Fulham and Hull City midfielder who was forced into premature retirement because of persistent knee injuries, dispenses his own Twelve Pillars of Football Wisdom. Bullard, 35, earned a reputation for playing practical jokes during his 13-year career in the professional game and Headline say his sense of humour shines through in Bend It Like Bullard. "We are extremely excited to be publishing Jimmy's first book," Headline announce in the publicity accompanying the cover picture. "We've read it, and trust us, it's hilarious." According to the publisher's blurb, Bend It Like Bullard is "a rip-roaring, life-enhancing, hilarious memoir from a football cult hero; very much in the same vein as recent bestsellers from Paul Merson and Jeff Stelling." Bullard, who grew up in the East End of London, worked as a painter and decorator but,...

FOOTBALL BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2014 In a World Cup year, it is no surprise that 2014 will bring a surge of football titles to bookstores and online retailers. Among the highlights are new autobiographies from Trevor Brooking and Terry Venables, both published by Simon & Schuster , a biography for Yellow Jersey of England legend Bobby Moore by Matt Dickinson, the chief sports correspondent of The Times , and Fergie Rises ( Aurum Press ), in which Michael Grant, chief football writer of The Herald newspaper in Glasgow, studies the early years of Sir Alex Ferguson's managerial career at Aberdeen. Bobby Moore collects the Jules Rimet Trophy from The Queen at Wembley in 1966 Fans of Jose Mourinho will delight in an illustrated celebration of his career due to be published by Headline in time for next Christmas.  Before that, headlines will doubtless follow when a controversial book on the Chelsea manager written by Spanish journalist Diego Torres is published...

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang has won the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for journalist Jamie Reid. The saga of 1960s turf skullduggery, in which a crooked bookmaker and his glamorous mistress, plus miscellaneous  gangsters, bent stable lads and a drug supplier nicknamed 'the Witch Doctor', conspired to nobble high-profile racehorses, won the vote of the judges to clinch the 25th anniversary award from a field that included two other tales of cheating in sport from the worlds of cycling and cricket. Seven Deadly Sins , in which journalist David Walsh recounts his pursuit of the disgraced Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, and Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy , which reveals many truths and destroys some myths about match-fixing in cricket, were both close contenders. A six-strong shortlist also included the straight-talking and grittily honest football autobiography I Am Zlatan Ibrahomivic , the story of an heroic Olympic ro...

As the man whose grand jury testimony brought down the most successful and celebrated cheat in the history of sport, cyclist Tyler Hamilton was out on his own among last year's contenders for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. The field for this year's prize -- the 25th since the award was launched in 1989 -- looks much more open. The longlist for the 2013 'Bookie Prize' sees football, tennis, rowing, horseracing, athletics, cycling and ping-pong among the sports represented, and features writers and performers from France, the Netherlands, America, Britain, Spain, Italy and Sweden. After the success of Tyler Hamilton's The Secret Race , there is another take on the downfall of Lance Armstrong in the shape of Seven Deadly Sins , which recounts the long campaign waged by another of those who helped expose the truth about the seven-times Tour de France champion's systematic drug use, the Sunday Times journalist, David Walsh. But it will take somet...