Sports Classics

Football matters, as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others... Football is inherent in the people... There is more eccentricity in deliberately disregarding it than in devoting a life to it. The way we play the game, organize it and reward it reflects the kind of community we are' Written just two years after England's '66 triumph when the national game was at its zenith, Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man is repeatedly quoted as the best book ever written about the sport. This definitive, magisterial study of football and society profiles includes interviews with all-time greats like Bobby Charlton, George Best, Alf Ramsay, Stanley Matthews, Matt Busby and Nat Lofthouse. It is a snapshot of a pivotal era in sporting history, changes and decisions were made in the sixties that would create the game we know today. For many who are disenchanted with the modern game — the grip of businesses and corporations, the dominance of advertising, the extortionate ticket prices and inaccessible matches, the fickleness of teenage millionaires — The Football Man takes the reader back to the heart and soul of the national game when pitches were muddy and the players were footballers not brands. Voted in May 2005 as one of Observer's top sports books of all time, this is a long-awaited reissue of the classic football 'bible'.

It remains a unique achievement. In 1971 the British Lions went to New Zealand and beat the All Blacks in a test series on their own soil. With gritty, never-say-die forwards like Ian McLaughlan and Mervyn Davies, and brilliant backs like Barry John, Gerald Davies and David Duckham, and under the inspired management of one of the finest coaches of all time, Carwyn James, the Lions won the first match, lost the second, and then came back to clinch the series in the third. But this unique rugby feat also spawned a unique book, for after the touring party had returned to the UK, the Lions captain John Dawes had the idea of organising an International Players' Conference, at which he and some of the key members of his victorious team would discuss the latest trends in rugby and offer the fruits of their experience in how to beat the greatest rugby team in the world. These talks and lectures were subsequently edited into a book, The Lions Speak by the Daily Telegraph's Rugby Correspondent, John Reason. In the years since it was first published, it has assumed cult status as one of the best and most insightful books ever published about the game of rugby. It stands as both a fascinating period piece about a sport that was played very differently in those days-when Bob Hiller would toe-punt penalties and conversions from a lovingly-crafted mud tee, and scrum halves like Gareth Edwards would launch his back-line from the scrum with a flamboyant diving pass-and a brilliant and witty deconstruction of the game's strategy and psychology by some of its most greatest and most intelligent practitioners, that is as relevant and valuable today as it ever was. Who better to talk about kicking and controlling the game than Barry John, or Mike Gibson on the role of the centre, or Carwyn James himself to reveal the secrets of his coaching methods that brought about the 1971 Lions' historic victory and British rugby's finest hour?

He is not a pro golfer. Nor a successful amateur, or a respected writer on the game. He is not a golf commentator, or a caddie, or a gold guru, or a Dutch sports psychologist, or ageing, golf-playing light entertainer. No: Richard Russell is just an ordinary golfer. An under-achieving member of Sunningdale, whose only claim to fame is that he never, ever wears a sweater—not even in January. He plays of 6, which is the worst handicap anyone can have in golf: too low to win the handicap competition, too high to win the scratch ones. Consequently, his life is one of joint fifteenths and dusty mantelpieces. Part autobiography, part theory, part book of golfing fun, My Baby Got the Yips is unlike any golf book you've ever read. It doesn't lift the lid on the Ryder Cup. It won't reveal the man behind the myth, and it doesn't go behind the scenes at the Majors. This playful memoir of a golfing nobody is concerned with much more interesting and rarely-ponders matters. For example: the best way to throw a golf club; the greatest golfer you've never heard of; the ten most marvellous golfing moments; the champion who became a hacker; the impossibleness of putting; the civilised splendour of the halfway hut, and the secret of golf. As you reach the end, you will conclude that this is a man who feels about golf the way that millions around the world do. Charming, funny and wise, My Baby got the Yips captures the essence of the game and touches everybody who plays it.

Acclaimed as a magisterial, classic work, A Social History of English Cricket is an encyclopaedic survey of the game, from its humble origins all the way to modern floodlit finishes. But it is also the story of English culture, mirrored in a sport that has always been a complex repository of our manners, hierarchies and politics. Derek Birley's survey of the impact on cricket of two world wars, Empire and 'the English caste system', will, contends Ian Wooldridge, 'teach an intelligent child of twelve more about their heritage than he or she will ever pick up at school.' In just under 400 pages Birley takes us through a rich historical tapestry: how the game was snatched from rustic obscurity by gentlemanly gamblers; became the height of late eighteenth century metropolitan fashion; was turned into both symbol and synonym for British imperialism; and its more recent struggle to dislodge the discomforting social values preserved in the game from its imperial heyday. Superbly witty and humorous, peopled by larger-than-life characters from Denis Compton to Ian Botham, and wholly forswearing nostalgia, A Social History of English Cricket is a tour-de-force by one of the great writers on cricket.