Sports Book of the Year

Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?

What a bunch of magnanimous sporting innovators we Brits are. Not only did we invent, construct, codify, order, tabulate, classify and at one point totally boss all the best pastimes in the known world, we then breathed deeply, sat back like potbellied relay runners and passed the baton on to other countries to trump the very cards we had laid. Boxing, cricket, horse racing, football, rowing, hockey, the modern olympics, pub games, rugger, you name it, someone with a double-barrelled surname in a small English town was playing it before anyone else.
Julian Norridge is an ace journalist and his brilliant book, Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?, documents all of these humble creations in the kind of lucid, affable and extremely through detail any sporting enthusiast will find engaging. Full of ace sporting anecdotes and, dare we say it, pub trivia, this referential tome serves as a great read as well as a factual delight.
It is always peculiar during major sporting occasions that whilst as a nation we realise, analyse and, at times, enbrace our inadequacies, for a comparatively poky kingdom there is also a perplexing sense of superiority we feel deep inside our beings. Julian Norridge and his excellent book help us unravel just why.

Can We Have Our Balls Back Please? by Julian Norridge (Penguin £9.99)