The £27,000 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize was awarded on Thursday to David Goldblatt for The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, a book praised by the Guardian’s reviewer, the historian David Kynaston, as “an enlightening, enriching ... survey of the sport in post‑Thatcher Britain, aka the age of globalisation ... an exceptional book that falls just short of greatness”.
Published by Viking, The Game of Our Lives was one of three football titles on the shortlist, alongside Michael Calvin’s Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Successful Football Manager and Martin Fletcher’s Fifty-Six: The Story of the Bradford Fire. Also shortlisted were Simon Lister’s study of 1970s West Indian cricket, Fire in Babylon, and books by Guardian writers Donald McRae and Andy Bull, A Man’s World and Speed Kings, on boxing and bobsledding respectively.
In choosing Goldblatt as the 27th winner, the judging panel – noticeably not short of figures, including the broadcaster Danny Kelly and former player Clarke Carlisle, for whom football is the main sport – didn’t break away from the norm as dramatically as they did last year, when Anna Krien became the second female bookies’ prize laureate (after Laura Hillenbrand, who won with Seabiscuit) with Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, a book about Australian Rules football which similarly showed the sport it focused on as mirroring and illuminating the wider culture.
But while The Game of Our Lives emerged from a typical all-male shortlist and reaffirms soccer’s hegemony (it’s the sport’s seventh winner, putting it well ahead of cricket and boxing), it does represent a significant departure from the tradition of a prize that tends to steer clear of nostalgic evocations of yesteryear and stars’ ghosted autobiographies in favour of accounts of the “dark heart” of sport: whether that takes the form of individual misery – books by or about the tortured sportsmen Brian Moore, Marcus Trescothick and Robert Enke – or doping in cycling, rape allegations in Aussie Rules and racism in cricket. The William Hill Sports Book of the Year usually goes, or so it can seem, to the most depressing sports book of the year.
Goldblatt’s winner is different in that, although his “glass is generally half empty rather than half full”, as Kynaston put it, gloom is not pervasive and he finds positive aspects to amply-rewarded ball-kicking such as clubs’ ability to “sustain distinct urban identities where civil society is fading away”. In William Hill terms, even part-time positivity is radical. Don’t imagine, though, that the judges have had a collective Damascene conversion and are now on the look-out for titles with an upbeat element. A slew of books are even now being written about drugs in athletics and Fifa corruption which are bound to trump lighter offerings when next year’s shortlist is chosen. Normal feelbad service will inevitably be resumed.
