London 2012 supremo Sebastian Coe to publish autobiography in November

SPORTS BOOK NEWS

Among his many reasons to hope the London Olympics is a resounding success, Sebastian Coe can now include his autobiography, due to be published in November.

The double gold medal-winner and head of the London 2012 Organising Committee has agreed a deal with publishers Hodder and Stoughton for a memoir to be released on November 8th.

As well as telling the story of the successful bid to bring the Games to this country, which Coe led, and his subsequent role in making them happen, the book will cover Coe's achievements as a middle-distance runner, winning four Olympic medals including the 1,500 metres gold in 1980 and 1984, plus his career in politics.

He became a Conservative MP in 1992 and was former leader William Hague’s chief of staff.  He was made a life peer in 2000.

Hodder’s sports editor Roddy Bloomfield said: "It is naturally a great honour for Hodder that Seb Coe has finally accepted our proposal. At last, we can expect to be allowed inside the mind of one of the most successful British athletes of all time."

Coe, who collaborated with journalist David Miller in a number of titles covering his career on the track, more recently wrote a book on leadership, drawing on his experiences in sport, politics and business, entitled The Winning Mind: What it Takes to Become a True Champion.

Read more about The Winning Mind at amazon.co.uk

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Fred Trueman book on Cricket Society-MCC Book of the Year shortlist

An starkly honest biography and an elegant romantic novel are among five titles short listed for the Cricket Society and MCC Cricket Book of the Year award for 2012.

Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography wins well deserved recognition for Chris Waters, cricket correspondent of the Yorkshire Post, who set about assessing the Yorkshire and England fast bowler’s life with the blessing and co-operation of family members yet managed to deliver an objective account that and does not always find in his subject’s favour.

The judging panel headed by Vic Marks, the former Somerset and England player who followed Trueman into the Test Match Special commentary box at the end of his career, will announce their choice in the Long Room at Lord’s on April 16.

The five contenders -- sifted from a field of 24 -- also include a nicely crafted biography of the former Warwickshire captain Frank Foster , a fascinating but ultimately tragic character who has a right to be seen as his county’s greatest player, in the opinion of author Robert Brooke.

Foster, whose career was curtailed by the Great War and did not resume following a motorcycle accident in 1915, played in the Triangular Tournament that brought together England, South Africa and Australia in the Test series of 1912 and is the subject of Patrick Ferriday’s Before the Lights Went Out, which also impressed the panel enough to make the cut.

The same period, subsequently recalled as cricket’s ‘golden age’, forms the backdrop to the work of fiction among the contenders, the novel Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn, whose unlikely imagined romance between a gentleman cricketer and a suffragette creates an evocative and insightful portrayal of a cosily complacent, conservative England -- of which cricket is a microcosm -- threatened by a revolution of unexpected origins.

The quintet is completed by Australia - Story of a Cricket Country, a collection of essays and articles assembled by Christian Ryan -- whose biography of Kim Hughes, Golden Boy, was best cricket book at the British Sports Book Awards in 2010 -- to tell not only the history of Australia’s cricketing success but the way in which the game helped shape that country’s character.

The five books on the shortlist:

(Click on the links for more information)

F.R.Foster: The Fields Were Sudden Bare, by Robert Brooke (ACS Publications).

Before the Lights Went Out: The 1912 Triangular Tournament, by Patrick Ferriday (Von Krumm Publishing).

Half of the Human Race, by Anthony Quinn (Jonathan Cape).

Australia - Story of a Cricket Country, by Christian Ryan (Hardie Grant Books).

Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography, by Chris Waters (Aurum).

The 19 that missed out:

Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, by Chris Arnot (Aurum).

The Cambridge Companion to Cricket, edited by Anthony Bateman and Jeffrey Hill (Cambridge University Press).

A Class Act; Walter Read, The Surrey Champion, by Keith Booth (ACS).

Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977, by Guy Fraser-Simpson (Elliott and Thompson).

Higgy - Matches, Microphones, and MS, by Alastair Hignell (A&C Black).

Australian Autopsy, by Jarrod Kimber (Pitch Publishing).

Jack Hobbs: England's Greatest Cricketer, by Leo McInstry  (Yellow Jersey Press).

Not Out First Ball, by Roger Morgan-Grenville and Richard Perkins (Bikeshed Books).

Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket's Greatest Spin Bowlers, by Amol Rajan (Yellow Jersey).

The Last Flannelled Fool, by Michael Simkins (Ebury).

The Following Game, by Jonathan Smith (Peridot Press).

The Breaks are Off: My Autobiography, by Graeme Swann (Hodder & Stoughton).

Tony Greig: A Reappraisal of English Cricket's Most Controversial Captain, by David Tossell (Pitch).

Twentieth Century All-Rounder, by Clive van Ryneveld (Pretext Publishers).

Arthur Milton: Last of the Double Internationals, by Mike Vockins (Methuen).

Ian Botham: The Power and the Glory, by Simon Wilde (Simon & Schuster).

Cricket and Broadcasting , by Jack Williams (Manchester University Press).

Behind the Boundary: Cricket at a Crossroads, by Graeme Wright (A&C Black).

Cricket's Historians, by Peter Wynne-Thomas (ACS).

All 24 books were nominated by either Cricket Society or MCC Members and not publishers. Marks and fellow judges David Kynaston and Stephen Fay, representing MCC, and John Symons and Chris Finch, for The Cricket Society, will determine which takes home the £3,000 prize, won last year by Harry Pearson for Slipless in Settle.

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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

New in Football Books

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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Stuart Broad signs two-book deal as Simon & Schuster add more cricket books to their catalogue

CRICKET BOOKS

England cricketer Stuart Broad is hoping his popularity within the game and beyond will be reflected in substantial book sales when Stuart Broad’s World of Cricket is published this autumn.

The book is the first product of a two-book deal the 25-year-old fast-bowling all-rounder has signed with publishers Simon & Schuster UK.

Simon & Schuster are making a strong push in sports books this year, particularly books about cricket, with the autobiography of Broad’s England teammate James Anderson due out in September, which is also the scheduled publication date for a biography of spin bowling legend Shane Warne by the fine Australian cricket writer, Gideon Haigh.

Executive director Kyle MacRae described Broad as “the undoubted star of the current English cricketing generation.”

“Stuart’s professionalism and appeal across all age groups makes him the number one choice for people who want to learn about the game, his world and the wider areas of international cricket,” MacRae said. “This will be one of the biggest sports books of 2012.”

It will be Broad’s second venture into print, following on from Stuart Broad Bowled Over: An Ashes Celebration - My Side of the Story, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2009.

Broad, the current England Twenty20 captain, a Twenty20 world champion and an Ashes winner in 2009, is back in Test match action this week as England begin their three-match series against Pakistan in Dubai.

Broad is England's fourth most-followed on Twitter

Stuart Broad's popularity is reflected is a Twitter following that today stood at 234,672 -- although he is not the most followed England player.

Anderson, in fact, commands a bigger audience for his Tweets, with 253,198 followers, although both have much ground to make up on Broad’s Nottinghamshire teammate, Graeme Swann, whose frequently quirky and occasionally outspoken comments attract an impressive 331,335 regulars.

No surprise that Swann’s autobiography, The Breaks Are Off, was the best-selling cricket book of 2011. The paperback edition is due out in May this year.

Yet they all trail by some distance in the wake of the England dressing room’s most talked-about character, former captain and star batsman Kevin Pietersen, who at the last count had some 436,352 hanging on his every Tweet.

Graeme Swann: The Breaks are Off - My Autobiography
Stuart Broad Bowled Over: An Ashes Celebration - My Side of the Story

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Paul Kimmage to ghost Brian O'Driscoll autobiography for Penguin Ireland

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Award-winning writer Paul Kimmage is to ghost the autobiography of Ireland’s Grand Slam-winning rugby captain, Brian O’Driscoll.

Dublin-born Kimmage, who recently won the William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year prize for Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson, has been signed up as part of the deal that landed Penguin Ireland the O’Driscoll story.

O’Driscoll, who was voted world player of the decade by Rugby World magazine in January 2010, is one of only two men to captain Ireland to a Grand Slam.  He has also led them to four Triple Crown triumphs and is Irish rugby’s all-time highest international try scorer with 46.

Kimmage, who recently left the Sunday Times, said he was honoured by the invitation to write O’Driscoll’s book. "It's incredibly flattering to be asked to do it,” he said. “Brian is one of our (Ireland’s) genuine superstars.”

Yet admirers of the 38-year-old former professional cyclist will not be at all surprised at Penguin’s eagerness to have him work with O’Driscoll.

Having established his credentials as a writer when Rough Ride, in which he lifted the lid on cycling’s doping culture, was named William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 1990, Kimmage entered journalism with the Sunday Independent in Ireland before moving to the Sunday Times in 2003, subsequently winning the Sports Journalists’ Association’s Interviewer of the Year award five times in a row.

It was after an interview with Matt Hampson, the England under-21 rugby prop who was left paralysed by a training ground accident, that he wrote Engage, which had been favourite to land him a second William Hill prize last year before the judges plumped for A Life Too Short, the tragic story for former Germany goalkeeper Robert Enke.

No publication date has been set for Brian O’Driscoll’s book. The 32-year-old outside centre is currently sidelined by a shoulder injury that has ruled him out of this year’s Six Nations championship.   But he hopes to tour Australia with the British and Irish Lions next year and has told Kimmage he does not want the book to be released before he retires.

Penguin believe they will have a winner on their hands whenever it comes out.

"Brian is a remarkable sportsman and has been an outstanding ambassador for Ireland both on and off the pitch,” the Penguin Ireland managing director, Michael McLoughlin, said. “We expect this autobiography to be an enormous bestseller."

It is Penguin Ireland’s second O’Driscoll book, following on from A Year in the Centre, published in 2005, which was a diary of the 2004-05 season, a painful one for the player in that it ended with serious injury in the first Test against New Zealand in Christchurch.

Also by Paul Kimmage:

Rough Ride: Behind the Wheel with a Pro Cyclist
Full Time: The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino
Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson

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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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