Didi Man with a big place in Liverpool folklore

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The Didi Man: My Love Affair with Liverpool

Published by: Headline (Hardcover)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

If Luis Suarez had only asked, a little advice from Dietmar Hamann could have spared the Uruguayan a lot of trouble.

The German international midfielder spent seven years on Merseyside, during which, quite apart from playing a major role in Liverpool’s epic triumph in the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul, he demonstrated everything that is correct about how a foreign player in England should conduct himself.

Intelligent and eloquent, even in a language not his own, Hamann won universal respect in the Premier League and particular affection among the Liverpool fans not least because of the evolution of his accent.  Just as the Dane, Jan Molby, seemed gradually to turn into a pukka Koppite, so Hamann appeared to learn his English from Jamie Carragher.  By the time he left, in 2006, he was calling himself the world's "only German Scouser".

Nicknamed The Didi Man with a nod towards another Merseyside icon, Ken Dodd,  at 6ft 3ins Hamann hardly qualifies as Diddy.  Yet it seems perfect for him as someone determined to embrace local culture.  So anglicised did he become that he even developed a fascination with cricket and managed to get a game for Alderley Edge Second XI in the Cheshire County League.

This book for the most part is a look back on his time at Anfield, told with warmth and a personality that reflects his humility and self-deprecating humour.  His part in the Istanbul legend, when he came off the bench at half-time, despite a broken toe, to inspire Liverpool’s fight back from 3-0 down, ensures a permanent place in the affections of the Kop.  The feeling is clearly mutual.

Who is the author?

Although Dietmar Hamann's name is on the cover, the words were assembled by Malcolm McClean, a writer and entrepreneur based in Alderley Edge.  He previously collaborated with Tottenham goalkeeper Brad Friedel on his book, Thinking Outside the Box.  He has written an entrepreneurial self-help guide, Bear Hunt, as well as To The Edge: Entrepreneurial Secrets from Britain's Richest Square Mile.

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Up Pohnpei -- how an English football journalist took charge of the world's worst national football team and turned them into winners

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Up Pohnpei: A quest to reclaim the soul of football by leading the world's ultimate underdogs to glory

Published by: Profile Books (Hardcover]

What’s it about?

Football journalist Paul Watson and his film-maker pal Matt Conrad decide late one evening in Watson’s London flat to become international footballers, an unlikely ambition for two lads in their early 20s with no professional experience but one they think they can fulfil if they first identify the world‘s worst national team.
Research leads them to Pohnpei, one of a group of islands in the Pacific known as Micronesia, about 1800 miles north of Australia. The team is ranked 220 in the world, its last known result is a 16-1 defeat to Guam, after which the coach quit and the team effectively disbanded.

The idea runs into a snag when they discover they will need to live on the island for five years before they become eligible to play. So they offer instead to become coach and assistant coach, a job which involves not only assembling a new team but establishing an island league so the players can showcase their talents, which in a population of 34,000 with a 90 per cent obesity rate require considerable nurturing.



Matt is offered a career opportunity in Los Angeles and has to leave but Paul, living in a hotel room paid for by the Micronesian Olympic Committee, stays on and somehow fashions a competitive team. In 2010, three years after the idea was born, the Pohnpei state team wins a match for the first time in its history, gaining revenge against Guam by beating their under-19s 7-1. The result sparks celebrations across the island. Paul hands over the coaching duties to the team captain and returns to the UK, feeling he has rediscovered football’s lost soul.

Who is the author?

Paul Watson, born in 1984, grew up in Bristol and counts himself a Bristol City fan, although he now lives in Twickenham. After obtaining a 2:1 in Italian at Leeds University he worked as a journalist for Channel Four’s Football Italia. He is the brother of the comedian, Mark Watson.

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All On Red offers an insider's view of Liverpool during their golden era

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All on Red: Ten Years at Anfield - A Liverpool fan's dream job

At first glance, All On Red might seem like just another offering from a football fan who fancies himself as a writer but Frank Gamble’s take on life as a Liverpool supporter comes from a slightly different perspective.

For a decade from 1979, Gamble was a particularly privileged fan, mixing work and pleasure as lottery sales manager of the club’s Development Association.

It was a decade in which Liverpool won six League titles, two European Cups, four League Cups and one FA Cup.  For Gamble, the experience of being behind the scenes at this time was unforgettable.  There were plenty of fans who shared his love for the club but few who had been asked to share their opinions with Joe Fagan, Bob Paisley and Roy Evans in the famous 'boot room'.

That happened to Gamble after one big European night at Anfield when, searching for his boss, commercial director Ken Addison, he stumbled across the club’s football brains trust in the middle of their customary post-match debriefing and found himself almost struck dumb when Fagan, then the manager, asked for his thoughts on the game.

“Joe Fagan was the nicest man I ever met in football by a country mile,” Gamble wrote. “His achievements in his first season replacing Bob (Paisley) have never received the acclaim they truly deserve.”

But All on Red, as an account of the Liverpool Gamble knew, is not without criticism.  He felt the club wasted the commercial opportunities presented by their success on the field, accusing chairman John Smith of being obsessed with cost-cutting when he should have been investing and of stifling Addison‘s creative flair by rejecting his ideas.

Manchester United 'light years ahead'

“These were the days and times that Liverpool should have pushed the pedal to the floor in terms of pulling away from our rivals commercially but certain people just couldn’t see the bigger picture and golden opportunities were missed,” he wrote.

By comparison, Manchester United were “light years ahead even then -- in February 1983.”

“We have been playing catch-up to this day and although commercial revenues have grown immensely in recent years we were slow out of the blocks and it cost us.”

Gamble, who now works in the energy sector, left Anfield in 2009 and went into print with All on Red only then.

He also gives an insider’s take on the Heysel tragedy, which he attributes in part to the atmosphere in Britain at the time, recalling a year of unrest at football grounds in the lead-up to the fateful night in Belgium that reflected the “angry society” that he felt existed in the country.

Gamble says he wrote the book to demonstrate how it felt to be a fan whose passion for a club became his livelihood and as such he has produced a supporter’s story that, for once, is unique.

All On Red: Ten Years at Anfield - A Liverpool fan's dream job, by Frank Gamble, is published by the excellent Cheltenham-based publisher, Sports Books.

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Sequel to popular 150 BC reflects perennial appetite for Brian Clough stories

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Clough: Confidential

Given that everyone in football of a certain vintage seems to have a Brian Clough story to recall it is not surprising that there have been around 20 books written about the late former Derby County and Nottingham Forest manager.

From the first biography, penned by broadcaster Tony Francis in 1987, to the latest -- and certainly longest -- account of his life and career, exhaustively researched and painstakingly documented by Jonathan Wilson, Clough has remained an enduring source of fascination.

Wilson manages to explode a few anecdotal myths in his 566-page tour de force but it is hard to imagine that the appetite for Brian Clough stories, apocryphal or otherwise, will ever be sated.

Midlands football writer Dave Armitage found that to be the case when he assembled 150 gems gleaned from press room colleagues and a host of figures from within the game under the imaginative title 150 BC.

It was a collection of amusing, amazing and sometimes touchingly poignant tales that proved very popular, so much so that the stories he reluctantly left out were soon supplemented by many more as memories were jogged and more classic Cloughie moments came to light.

Armitage, who publishes under his own Hot Air imprint, sensed a sequel in the offing and the end result was Clough: Confidential, which brings together almost as many snapshots of Old Big ‘Ead as the first volume.

'Best book on Brian Clough' -- Kenny Burns

"There was never a plan for a second volume until the stories kept coming in," Armitage says.

"Forest legend Kenny Burns kindly took time to tell me he felt it was the best book on Clough he had ever read. A number of people who knew Cloughie exceptionally well took pains to say how much they had enjoyed it and were happy to give up even more of their memories."

It’s a sparkling read, naturally dominated by the years at Derby and Forest for which Clough was clearly famed most but not without reference to his briefer tenures -- very much briefer, in one instance -- at Brighton and Leeds.

John Vinicombe, the former Brighton Argus reporter -- who passed away last year, sadly -- provided a taste of how the Clough effect manifested itself by tripling the gates at Albion’s old Goldstone Ground and how the Clough Era is still talked about on the south coast, even though it lasted only eight months.

And Norman Hunter, hardly a fan as a first-hand dressing-room witness to Clough’s disastrous 44 days at Elland Road, recalls that, on the day he was sacked, Clough walked into a meeting of his testimonial committee and implored them to “raise all the money you can for this man because he deserves it.”

Hunter says: “I find myself strangely protective towards the memory of Brian Clough despite the fact that it took him until the 44th day of his reign to say anything nice about me.”

Buy Clough: Confidential and 150 B.C.: Cloughie - the Inside Stories direct from Amazon.

Further reading
More Cloughie tales on way as Armitage scores a go-it-alone hit

Learn more about Jonathan Wilson's biography of Brian Clough...
Unravelling the real truth behind the legend of Brian Clough
Clough, Taylor and why Sunderland still wonders what might have been

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Inside the Divide: Richard Wilson gets to the heart of Celtic v Rangers rivalry

The rivalry between Celtic and Rangers has seldom been less than intense since they first squared up to one another on May 28th, 1888.  Explosions of hatred between opposing supporters have been commonplace but the 2010-11 season will be remembered as particularly poisonous.

It was a season in which Celtic fans protested against the poppy, in which Celtic’s continuous complaints against referees led the officials to go on strike, in which Uefa fined Rangers for sectarian chanting and a Celtic fan was jailed for racially abusing the Rangers player, El-Hadji Diouf.

It was a season in which an Old Firm game of three red cards, 13 yellows and 34 arrests inside Celtic Park ended with rival managers Ally McCoist and Neil Lennon having to be dragged apart but which then sank to even lower depths as death threats were made against Celtic boss Lennon, who received bullets and explosives in the post.  Lennon was subsequently attacked by a Hearts supporter on the touchline during a televised match at Tynecastle.

Given this backdrop, Richard Wilson’s attempt to get to the core of a football enmity that outstrips all others comes at a timely moment and his new book, Inside the Divide: One City, Two Teams ... The Old Firm, has already attracted some glowing reviews.

The author, who has spent much of his working life as a football journalist in Glasgow, collecting several awards along the way, builds his narrative around the unfolding of one Old Firm match, in January 2010, chosen simply because it was the first to occur after he found a publisher willing to run with his idea.

He set out to view this game from multiple perspectives, interviewing not only participants and supporters but those involved at the peripheries, including the senior duty police officer and the Sky television commentator, even an A&E nurse on duty to attend to incoming wounded.  With their stories as a central thread that holds the tale together, he finds points at which to delve into the history of the game and to explore its social, political and religious context.

Reviewing for the Observer, Kevin McKenna describes Inside the Divide as “insightful and wonderfully written” and applauds Wilson’s efforts to identify the factors that make the Old Firm game unparalleled among derbies.  “Wilson, more than anyone in recent years, has told us why Celtic and Rangers matter and why their adherents have little of which to be ashamed and much of which to be proud,” he writes.

Writing in The Scotsman, Richard Bath confesses to disliking Wilson’s interspersing of his own “excellent narrative” with dramatic, fictional re-constructions of actual events (in the manner of David Peace in The Damned United) but is otherwise largely complimentary.

He describes what he perceives as Scotland’s “simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the Old Firm” as “a complicated relationship which Wilson chronicles with some dexterity.”

He adds that “the chapter devoted to Mo Johnston is particularly good, as is his analysis of how non-Scottish players such as Paul Gascoigne...were sucked into the whirlpool of heightened emotions and sectarianism which accompanies the Old Firm rivalry.”

Inside the Divide is, he concludes, “an entertaining book that illuminates much about the Old Firm, and about Scotland as a nation.”

Buy Inside the Divide: One City, Two Teams...The Old Firm direct from Amazon.

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Arthur Kinnaird - a philanthropic nobleman and unsung football pioneer

Recommended in football books


During the 1870s and 80s, when he appeared in a record nine FA Cup finals for Wanderers and Old Etonians, Arthur Kinnaird was almost as colossal a figure in football as W G Grace had become in cricket.

There were even physical similarities.  Grace was easily identified by his ‘yeoman figure and shaggy beard’ -- the precise words used by the editor of Athletic News to describe Kinnaird. And just as Grace had his trademark yellow and red cricket cap, Kinnaird’s white trousers and blue and white quartered cap made him easy to pick out on the football field.

But where the life of Dr Grace, and his importance in the development and popularity of cricket, has been documented many times, the role of Kinnaird -- he inherited the title of Lord Kinnaird in 1887 -- was less well researched until sports historian Andy Mitchell decided to investigate.

Yet quite apart from being a considerable player in his day -- he has been described as football’s ‘first superstar’ and ‘without exception, the best player’ of his era -- he also served the game as a hugely influential administrator.  A Football Association committee member at only 21 years old in 1868, he was the organisation’s treasurer for 13 years and president from 1890 until his death in 1923, shortly before the opening of Wembley Stadium.

It was a life that began to interest Mitchell when he was working in Perthshire, the home of the London-born Kinnaird’s Scottish aristocratic family.

“With my interest in football history I was intrigued by this character who hailed from Perthshire,“ Mitchell said in an interview with the Perthshire Advertiser.

“Kinnaird features in a lot of books but only on a superficial level – he was clearly important but nobody had ever researched his life. He has gone down for posterity as someone fond of 'hacking', a bit of a toff who dabbled in football. But he was a key influence in the development of the sport.”

Kinnaird was born in Kennington, educated at Cheam School, Eton College and Cambridge University and became a director of Barclays Bank.  Yet he selected and played for Scotland’s first international team and Mitchell’s interest intensified when he himself became involved with Scottish football as Head of Communications at the Scottish FA.

“I spent 10 years at the SFA, travelling with the Scotland team,” he said. “After leaving them in 2007 I took the opportunity to research early football in greater detail, and decided to write this book on Arthur Kinnaird.”

Mitchell’s research took him first to the Kinnaird family home at Rossie Priory, where his great-granddaughter, Caroline Best, still runs the estate, and later to London, both to delve into the archives of Eton College and the FA, and to visit some of Kinnaird’s favourite haunts in Victorian London.

He discovered that far from being merely ‘a toff who dabbled in football’(and whose reputation for 'hacking' - i.e. kicking opponents - was almost certainly misplaced), the 11th Lord Kinnaird pursued another life as a social justice pioneer of extraordinary philanthropy. He spent nights on the streets, helping destitute orphans learn to read and write, and set up schools for the poor, giving away considerable sums from the fortune he made in banking.  Himself touched by tragedy -- he lost two sons in the First World War -- he fostered the spread of evangelical Christianity as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and was president of both the YMCA and YWCA.

Arthur Kinnaird: First Lord of Football has won praise for Mitchell’s meticulous research and for editorial standards of accuracy and presentation not always associated with the independent and self-published sectors.

But, much more than that, it deserves to be acknowledged --  given that football rose under Kinnaird’s stewardship from a game played in muddy parks to an enormous, international spectator sport  -- for adding missing detail to a hugely important phase in the history of the game.

As Mitchell puts it: “Arthur Kinnaird was quite a man – and I hope this book belatedly brings him the recognition he deserves.”

“ARTHUR Kinnaird: First Lord of Football” is published by CreateSpace (www.createspace.com), an amazon.com company.

Buy Arthur Kinnaird: First Lord of Football

For more information about the book, go to www.lordkinnaird.com

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Ridley marks milestone with crafted chronicle of the Premier League

Recommended in football books

Two decades ago, to mark the last season of English professional football in its traditional single-league, four-division structure, sports writer Ian Ridley embarked on a journey around the domestic game, from the top right down to grassroots level.

He aimed to capture a snapshot of football at what he knew was a watershed moment in its history, with the birth of the Premier League about to bring about a transformation.  His book, Season in the Cold, won critical acclaim.

At that point, football in England was in crisis, tainted by hooliganism, with attendances in decline at antiquated stadiums, and debts on the rise.  These were the factors which had collided catastrophically in two disasters, at Bradford and Hillsborough.  The Taylor Report into the latter, its recommendations leading to the compulsory development of all-seater stadia, had set the wheels of change in motion but the establishment of the Premier League and the riches generated by the new cash cow of satellite television would take change to a whole new level.

Now Ridley has retraced his steps to paint a new, updated picture of the state of the game in a sequel, There's a Golden Sky.   As in 1991-92, he analyses the state of the top clubs, but also stops off at many places further down the football pyramid, such as Crewe and Blackpool and Portsmouth, and takes the pulse of the non-League game for which, as former chairman of Weymouth and the current chairman of St Albans City, he has a particular affection.

He finds football at the highest level enjoying unprecedented wealth, the leading players earning astronomical rewards, yet ponders whether it has lost touch with reality. There's a Golden Sky, which takes its title from the opening verse of the football anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone, includes some fascinating interviews, including the chairmen of Wembley FC and Truro City and the Chelsea supremo, Bruce Buck, referee Mark Halsey and fallen star Paul Gascoigne.  He revisit’s the Doncaster Belles women’s team and searches for the soul of the game back on Hackney Marshes.

There's a Golden Sky serves as a history of football in the last 20 years, chronicled by one of the best writers working in football today.

Ian Ridley began his career as an editorial assistant on Building magazine and was sports editor at the Worksop Guardian before joining the Hemel Hempstead Evening Post Echo.  His first post on a national newspaper was with the Guardian and he has since written for the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Express.

In addition to Season in the Cold, His previous books include biographies of Eric Cantona and Kevin Keegan and Floodlit Dreams, which described his term as chairman of Southern League club Weymouth.  He has also collaborated on autobiographies with Tony Adams, Paul Merson and Steve Claridge.


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How a football fan with his ear to the ground found chants to be a fine thing

Sports books for Christmas


Scratching your head for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here are a few of the more amusing sports books published this year:


Who Are Ya? The talkSport Book of Football's Best Ever Chants, by Gershon Portnoi (Simon & Schuster)

The excited buzz of a packed stadium is every bit as important as the competitors in making a sports event a genuinely big occasion and nowhere is that more true than football, where the crowd are participants as well as spectators.

Indeed, football is unique in that not only do supporters cheer or boo in approval or otherwise, they turn their feelings, thoughts and observations into words and then set them to music, so that the action on the field comes with its own soundtrack, too.

Over the years, British football fans in particular have developed a huge repertoire of songs and chants, from club anthems down to ditties aimed at individual players, so many that sports writer Gershon Portnoi has turned them into a book.

Portnoi, former sports editor of Nuts magazine and until recently deputy editor of TalkSport’s online magazine, says it was a journey on a tube train that inspired him to start noting down words and researching origins.

“A bunch of lads were looking in my direction when they burst into singing a song about Christian Dailly, the former West Ham player,” Portnoi said.  “They were aiming the song at me because my hair apparently made me look like him.

“It started me thinking about the whole culture of football songs and how they are often not only funny but in many cases very clever and I wondered if I could make them into a book.”

Having enjoyed success with a previous book of cricket sledges -- entitled Why Are You So Fat? -- Portnoi set about researching.

Combining those chants he had heard himself with others found on supporters’ websites and in YouTube videos, he found enough eventually to fill 176 pages.

“The most difficult part was verifying who had claim to be the originator of a chant and there were quite a few grey areas and disputes, particularly where a club has adopted a song as an anthem where there is no obvious connection with their team,” he said.

These range from Stoke’s regular singing of the Tom Jones classic Delilah, Birmingham City’s Keep Right On to the End of the Road and Liverpool’s You’ll Never Walk Alone to the bizarre and unfathomable Wheelbarrow Song beloved of Notts County fans.  Sung repeatedly to the tune of On Top of Old Smokey, it consists of just eight words: “I had a wheelbarrow, the wheels fell off.”

“That was one of the stranger ones,” Portnoi said. “It started at a game against Shrewsbury at Gay Meadow in 1990.  One version of the story is that some County fans saw someone pushing a wheelbarrow and were inspired to make fun of a Shrewsbury song by putting their own words to it.

“Whatever the origin, it acquired a mystical significance because after being 2-0 down with 10 minutes left, County came back to draw 2-2 and went on a run that saw them promoted.  So the song stuck.

“The research took me about six months.  Of the chants, some like the Notts County one are bizarre, others just a bit silly, but some are really fantastic pieces of poetry.”

One word of warning to anyone lucky enough to find Who Are Ya? in his Christmas stocking: the author's accuracy with the wording of the chants does not make allowance for sensitive ears -- some would consist almost entirely of asterisks if he did.  Not one to be read out to the relatives, perhaps.

Also recommended for a football-themed sporting laugh are Daniel Taylor’s Squeaky Bum Time: The Wit and Wisdom of Sir Alex Ferguson (Aurum) and David Moor’s The Worst Football Kits of All Time (The History Press).

Cricket fans meanwhile will enjoy CrickiLeaks: The Secret Ashes Diaries (John Wisden & Co Ltd), written by Alan Tyers and illustrated by Beach.

From the team responsible previously for W.G. Grace Ate My Pedalo, Crickileaks is an hilarious collection of 40 imagined cricketing diaries, along with the illustrated book covers they might have inspired.

Featuring spoof journal entries drawn from throughout Ashes history, CrickiLeaks ‘reveals’ the innermost thoughts of the greatest cricketers of the last 129 years -- Shane Warne, Freddie Flintoff, Sir Ian Botham, Geoffrey Boycott, Donald Bradman and the great W.G. among them -- as well as those of some less obvious personalities.

Readers will discover, among other things, what was going through Mike Gatting's mind as he faced the ball of the century, why Ricky Ponting lost his rag with Ronald McDonald and what really went on between Douglas Jardine and Daphne the Koala in Adelaide Zoo!



More books by Gershon Portnoi
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Punditry reaping the benefits as Red Nev takes his love of an argument from page to screen

Sports books for Christmas

Gary Neville’s studio manner might need polishing but the former Manchester United captain and England defender winning over the sceptics as a media commentator for his willingness to engage in meaningful debate.

It struck a positive note, certainly, with the Independent’s venerable columnist James Lawton, who described Neville’s verbal jousting with the wise but prickly Graeme Souness during the Sky Sports coverage of Liverpool’s match against Manchester City on Sunday as something that “should be weighed in gold” by their bosses “blowing away the studio double-talk that has tumbled so relentlessly down the years.”

In Neville’s case, he has picked up where he left off, to an extent, in his autobiography Red, which has been one of the top sellers in sports books during 2011.

** Sports Book Deals in Amazon's 12 days of Christmas promotion **


Red was notable for the way in which Neville -- England's shop steward during the Rio Ferdinand strike threat -- did not shy away from taking aim at some very high profile targets, in particular the managers he served during an 85-cap international career that, he said, felt at times like “a massive waste of time”.

Glenn Hoddle, Kevin Keegan, Sven-Goran Eriksson and Steve McClaren all suffered a broadside.  Terry Venables was spared but even Fabio Capello, who had Neville in his squad for a couple of games without picking him in the team, did not escape, despite initially making a good impression.

Neville lambasted Hoddle for his embracing of faith healer Eileen Drewery, Keegan for taking England back to the era of card games and race nights, Eriksson for being in thrall to David Beckham and McClaren for then kicking Beckham out.

Not surprisingly, his views on Sir Alex Ferguson are somewhat less obviously critical but this is not so much out of fear as unapologetic admiration.

Red is one of a dozen or so sports books featuring in Amazon’s ‘12 days of Christmas’ promotion, which runs until December 11th and offers discounts of up to 65 per cent.

Manchester United fans are particularly well catered for.  The lavishly illustrated Paul Scholes autobiography, Scholes: My Story, is another on the list.  Scholes was a media shy man of few public words during his playing career and the words, written with the aid of experienced football scribe Ivan Ponting, can hardly be compared with Gary Neville’s as a source of insightful controversy.  Yet My Story, while dominated by photographs, has been praised for reflecting Scholes’s mischievous sense of humour and his undoubted pleasure at being part of the Manchester United family.

The ginger midfielder’s love for United would make him an ideal candidate to receive a gift-wrapped copy of Sir Alex Ferguson: The Official Manchester United Story of 25 Years at The Top, the club’s own tribute of Fergie’s quarter of a century at Old Trafford.

Ivan Ponting also collaborated with former United legend Denis Law in another picture-led story, crafting Law’s comments to make pleasant, good-humoured reading between the illustrations in Denis Law: My Life in Football.
Pictures feature heavily, too, in Glorious: My World, Football and Me, which allows Paul Gascoigne to describe the moments and events that he feels defined his career in his own voice.

Readers looking for a more absorbing narrative away from football will be attracted by Rafa: My Story, in which the accomplished interviewer and writer John Carlin coaxes out some deep insight into the mind of Spanish tennis champion Rafael Nadal, revealing much of the emotional side of a player noted for guarding his privacy, and details about the home life of which Nadal had not spoken before.

Racing Through the Dark, the take-no-prisoners story of the doping culture in cycling that shape the career of David Millar, offers an even more gripping and gritty tale, one that was short listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011, while Tony McCoy, 16-times champion jockey and winner of every major National Hunt racing prize, has been short listed for William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year for My Autobiography  (his second, in fact),  written with the help of the Irish racing journalist and broadcaster Donn McClean.

The promotion offers a couple of titles with Olympics fans in mind in the shape of Gold Rush, an analysis of what makes an Olympic champion conducted by four-times Olympic gold medallist Michael Johnson, and Sir Steve Redgrave’s choice of Great Olympic Moments.

Lawrence Dallaglio’s World Cup Rugby Tales might seem a little tame in the light of the shame brought upon themselves by England players at the latest tournament but the former England captain will nonetheless delight rugby fans who prefer their anecdotes with traditional earthiness but a little less controversy.

And no football fan’s Christmas stocking would be the poorer for the presence of The Worst Football Kits of All Time, Dave Moor’s full-colour celebration of some of the most outrageous strips foisted upon the poor players and bemused supporters, even before commercial pressures drove designers to outrageous lengths to boost replica sales.  Some of the horrors were those worn by Victorian gentleman long before club shops were even imagined.

The full list of titles.  Click on the link to buy.

Red: My Autobiography, by Gary Neville (Bantam Press)
Scholes: My Story, by Paul Scholls (Simon & Schuster)
Sir Alex Ferguson: The Official Manchester United Story of 25 Years at The Top (Simon & Schuster)
Denis Law: My Life in Football, by Denis Law and Ivan Ponting (Simon & Schuster)
Glorious: My World, Football and Me, by Paul Gascoigne (Simon & Schuster)
Rafa: My Story, by Rafael Nadal and John Carlin (Sphere)
Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar, by David Millar (Orion)
A.P. McCoy: My Autobiography, by A.P. McCoy (Orion)
Gold Rush, by Michael Johnson (HarperSport)
Great Olympic Moments, by Steve Redgrave (Headline)
World Cup Rugby Tales, by Lawrence Dallaglio (Simon & Schuster)
The Worst Football Kits of All Time, by Dave Moor (The History Press)

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