From the Biography of Leeds United to Megan Rapinoe’s memoir

The Rodchenkov Affair, by Grigory Rodchenkov

Penguin, £9.99 in paperback

Grigory Rodchenkov’s inside take on large-scale doping fraud – he was the boss of Moscow’s WADA-accredited lab – recently won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.

It also started a minor controversy when Ian Ridley, one of the other shortlisted authors, rejected his £3,000 runner-up prize in protest.

It is true that Rodchenkov shows zero remorse for his brilliantly choreographed cheating. But then, how much must a book carry the sins of its author?

What we can say is that, if you have any interest in doping and the struggle to contain it, the detail here makes The Rodchenkov Affair an absolute must-read.

The Biography of Leeds United, by Rob Bagchi

Vision Sports Publishing, £20

Even when Leeds are crap, they are fascinatingly crap, as David Peace reminded us with his fine novel The Damned United. Now, here is The Telegraph’s own Rob Bagchi to cover the whole 101-year history of the club.

He does so with gusto, from the “bowel-withering” challenges of wartime centre-half Wilf Copping to the “electrified razor wire” that constituted teenage striker Alan Smith.

My favourite Leeds story – the one from the spendthrift Peter Ridsdale period, when Seth Johnson supposedly went into a meeting hoping to be offered £13,000 a week and was told he would have to settle for £30,000 a week instead – isn’t in here.

But, in light of Bagchi’s encyclopaedic knowledge, that must mean it’s apocryphal.

One Life, by Megan Rapinoe

Penguin, £20

The Golden Boot winner from the 2019 World Cup, Rapinoe offers a fierce, punkish take on a sporting world in which most athletes are “afraid to step out of line”. Not Rapinoe.

She came out on the eve of the 2012 Olympics, knelt in support of Black Lives Matter in 2016, and publicly upbraided Donald Trump for “excluding people like me”.

Her memoir, co-written with Guardian columnist Emma Brockes, is full of exasperation at the way football people – from fans to coaches and administrators – prefer to ignore awkward real-life issues.

On the flipside, however, this is exactly why athlete advocates are so powerful: they reach out to the unconverted.

What A Flanker, by James Haskell

HarperCollins, £20

The smirking pun in the title says it all: this book would make an ill-advised gift for your maiden aunt.

Haskell – who finished his career at 14th in the list of England’s most capped players – charges through a series of off-colour anecdotes with the insouciance of a man who doesn’t care who he offends.

A few names are withheld; many more are included. And a remarkably high proportion of the stories involve excrement.

Yes, this is a true rugger bugger’s book and none the worse for that, mainly because Haskell has enough self-awareness to acknowledge his own absurdities. In a year of extreme seriousness, this is the one book on our list which is often laugh-out-loud funny.

The Hurt, by Dylan Hartley

Viking, £20

Again, the title tells the story. There are definitely no laughs in Hartley’s creased-brow analysis, which takes in his own career and the broader state of the game.

His win-at-all-costs mentality surfaces early – as, for instance, in the under-19 club friendly when he threw a flurry at punches at Kevin Davies, for no good reason other than Davies’ position ahead of him in the international pecking order.

“Kevin was substituted, with a bloodied lip,” Hartley writes, “and never played for England again.”

Although not the easiest of reads, The Hurt offers the best inside account thus far of Eddie Jones’ methods, and also – in its compelling accounts of physical agony – an argument for the unsustainability of modern rugby.

The Commonwealth of Cricket, by Ramachandra Guha

William Collins, £20

Not content with his day job as a historian and economist, Guha also fills the same role within India that Scyld Berry and Gideon Haigh do in England and Australia. In other words, he is the deepest and wisest chronicler of his cricketing nation.

Most of this latest book is a very personal tour through his upbringing in Delhi and Dehradun, but towards the end he addresses his brief service as a cricket administrator.

After six months, he resigned in protest at the myriad conflicts of interest within the Board of Cricket Control for India.

In a recent interview, he described the board as “corrupt”, “nepotistic” and “a lost cause”.

Morgan’s Men, by Nick Hoult and Steve James

Allen & Unwin, £18.99

In the absence of much good stuff to celebrate in 2020, here is an instant flashback to the final of last year’s cricket World Cup.

And beyond that, to an unusually sure-footed England build-up, starting with Andrew Strauss’ arrival as director of cricket four years earlier.

Working together, the old Middlesex partnership of Strauss and white-ball captain Eoin Morgan did away with the “wickets-in-hand” dogma that had afflicted England for more than 20 years, and inserted swashbuckling adventure in its place.

In their first 50-over match under the new regime, Morgan’s men walloped 408 for nine against New Zealand. They have never looked back since.

The Second Life of Tiger Woods, by Michael Bamberger

Simon & Schuster, £20

Another 2019 tale retold with great insight and sensitivity. A senior Sports Illustrated writer, Bamberger focuses on the 22-month period between Woods’s arrest for “driving under the influence” and his fifth US Masters title (in April 2019).

It was a miraculous story arc, humanising a man previously renowned as golf’s most inaccessible personality.

This book isn’t a soft-soap job. Bamberger also takes an unflinching look at Woods’ history of rule violations, plus the doping rumours that accompanied the physical transformation of his early 20s.

Ultimately, though, this is a very humane piece of work. As Rory McIlroy puts it, “With Tiger, people don’t feel like they’re on the outside looking in any more.”

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