Anyone nostalgic for days long gone should read Bill Jones's William Hill-shortlisted The Ghost Runner (Mainstream £12.99), a grimly compelling account of 1950s athlete John Tarrant's battle against officials who wielded the ideal of amateurism as a means of excluding outsiders.Ĭlass conflict also infuses Guy Fraser-Sampson's Cricket at the Crossroads (Elliott & Thompson £18.99), an uneven account of the game between 19 which is excellent on the demise of Brian Close as England captain and the betrayal by officialdom of Basil D'Oliveira. Specialised professionalism makes such feats almost inconceivable nowadays. A great two-sport predecessor, both Olympic sprint relay medallist and winning try-scorer last time Wales beat the All Blacks, is Ken Jones, who gets the biography he has long deserved in Steve Lewis's Ken Jones: Boots & Spikes (Sportsbooks £18.99). Another ill-fated rugby man, Alastair Hignell, confronts multiple sclerosis with similarly clear-eyed honesty in Higgy: Matches, Microphones and MS (Bloomsbury £18.99), an account of his playing and broadcasting career as thoughtful and likable as the man himself.Īlso a fine cricketer, Hignell was a rare modern two-sport star. But while Paul Kimmage's ingeniously scripted Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson (Simon & Schuster £16.99) vividly conveys the rage, fear and distress of a young rugby player paralysed for life by a collapsing scrum, its depiction of an irrepressible spirit is too uplifting to qualify. In recounting Enke's personal calvary, Reng, already known in Britain for his Keeper of Dreams, also offers sharply humane insights into the singularity of goalkeepers and the predatory madness of big-time football.Īt least one critic saw this year's shortlist as merging sports books with "misery lit". While Reng's victory with his compassionate, moving life of the German goalkeeper who killed himself in 2009 was announced the day after Wales manager Gary Speed's baffling suicide, the decision had been made earlier. It would be easy to indict the judges of this year's William Hill prize – sportswriting's Booker – for opportunist cynicism in selecting Ronald Reng's A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (Yellow Jersey £16.99) as this year's winner.