The Sports Bookshelf

David McVay's professional football career spanned only nine seasons, during which time the imprint he left on the game was such that the title he chose when he was encouraged to publish the journal he kept during part of that time seemed entirely apt.   Diary of a Football Nobody , first published in 2003, was exactly as described: a collection of daily reflections, reproduced exactly as they were written at the time, on life as a player of modest ability plying his trade with a club associated mostly with modest attainment, in his case Notts County, the world's oldest football league club, during the 1970s. McVay gave up keeping the diary, he recalls, early in 1976, thanks to "a lager-logged brain and an incurable bout of apathy" and though he had the foresight to stow his ramblings in a drawer rather than bin them, it was not in any expectation of revealing them to a wider world. Yet for the next couple of weeks they are being not only revisited but broug...

Did you love the Ryder Cup? Are you already a committed golf fan, or did the great comeback in Medinah open up a new dimension to your sporting fascinations? Golf has traditionally been a source of good reading for sports fans, and no sport offers a greater proliferation of instructional guides for the enthusiastic amateur. Here is The Sports Bookshelf's potted guide to 10 of today's most popular golf books . Click on the picture or text links for more information and to buy. Out of Bounds: Legendary Tales From the 19th Hole , by Sam Torrance (Simon & Schuster) Sam Torrance, Scottish golfing legend, veteran of eight Ryder Cups, sank the winning put as Europe ended 28 years of US dominance at The Belfry in 1985 and returned to the Midlands course as winning captain in 2002. A natural raconteur, Sam has a fund of insights and anecdotes, some hilarious, some eyebrow-raising. In this new book, he divulges tall tales from the great, the good and the not-so-g...

Television sports presenter Clare Balding leads a strong sporting line-up at the Ilkley Literature Festival, which began today in the beautiful Yorkshire spa town and continues for the next two and a half weeks. Clare will be talking about her newly-published memoir, My Animals and Other Family , at the Kings Hall on Friday, October 12 (7.30pm). My Animals and Other Family (Viking) is a memoir of Clare's early life at the racing stables run by her father, Ian Balding, where she sat astride legendary thoroughbreds such as Mill Reef, winner of the Derby and the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, and would sometimes walk into the family kitchen to find the Queen sitting at the breakfast table. Tour de France winner Stephen Roche , rugby league giant Robbie Paul and former England Test batsman Ed Smith are other sports stars who will be appearing at the Festival. Roche, the Irishman who won the cycling triple crown of Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and world championshi...