Hornby, Rennick, Imlach, Kuper and er, Richards!

David Rennick’s book on Muhammad Ali, King Of The World, was named the best ever sports book in The Times this week, but I’m hoping to knock it off its next year.
While that probably won’t realistically happen, I’ll be joining the list of great sports novelists in the new year with the release of my first novel, Memorabilia.
The Times list of the top 50 sports books sadly excluded my first book, Touchdown UK, which I’m sure was number 51 (they have to cut the list of somewhere I naturally told myself), but looking down the list at all the great books I’ve read was really comforting.
My bookshelf at home and that Times list share some great reads, Simon Kuper’s, Football Against The Enemy, Eamon Dunphy’s A Strange Kind of Glory, Full Time The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino, My Father and Other Working Class Football Hero’s by the great Gary Imlach, The Damned United by David Peace, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and All Played Out by Pete Davis.
I though Duncan Hamilton‘s Brian Clough memoir Provided You Don’t Kiss Me should have made the list, but I was really pleased that my favourite sports book of all time is sitting on there at 23.
That book is David Winner’s book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football which was published in 2000. As a man with a Dutch influence in my family it’s a great dissection of the Dutch psyche, and analyses why the country as a whole is transfixed by the idea of glorious failure as opposed to the Germanic way of victory above all.
It’s almost a decade since I first read that book, and I’m hoping that people will take to my sports-based novel Memorabilia in the same way.
While Nick Hornby wrote about being a football fan and we’ve had a plethora of books on being a hooligan, watching football around the world and following individual teams, my book is one of few out there based around the sporting themes of gambling and sports memorabilia.
It’s set mainly in East Anglia in the summer of 2010 and involves two main characters at different stages of their careers as collectors and being sports fans. It’s being release in February through Grosvenor House – watch this space for more info!