Prizewinning football analysis, inside Jamaica’s sprint factory, and the psychology of winners (and losers)
- Best of culture in 2015: see this year’s cultural highlights, chosen by the Guardian’s writers and critics
Academic writing, not always unfairly, gets a bad rap. But the best combines the passion of the true enthusiast, a forensic eye for evidence and an ability to tell a compelling story. Those qualities are epitomised by Tony Collins’s The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby (Bloomsbury). Collins recounts the global sweep of the sport’s history, including both codes (union and league) and the North American variants, using original sources to cut through myth and hearsay, and revealing an instinct for telling anecdote and detail. His authoritative account stands with David Goldblatt’s football history The Ball Is Round. Similar qualities show in Goldblatt’s The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football
(Penguin), the recent victory of which in the William Hill sports book of the year award reflected a shift in the judges’ emphasis from the personal to the analytical.
That rebalancing worked against books that might previously have won. Martin Fletcher’s 56: The Story of the Bradford Fire (Bloomsbury) is a compelling memoir of a 12-year-old who lost his brother, father, grandfather and uncle in the football fire of 1985, but it is made remarkable by his adult quest to establish its causes, and should, if there is justice, bring the real prize of reopening the inquiry.
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