Sports

6. Clarey, Master (16 April 2025)

by kurto

A privileged, well-drawn biography of Swiss tennis great Roger Federer, highlighting the once-temperamental teenager’s transformation to a paragon of elegance as well as his rivalries with Raphael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.

Federer uniquely directed a long-lived, peripatetic career, managing business decisions (with his wife’s help) and leading the player union’s welfare and also promotional activities. He had chosen tennis over soccer for the promise of superior individual control of affair (i.e., less dependency on team and third-party management). The untimely passing of early coach Peter Carter, whom he had somewhat unsentimentally released, was a turning point.
Consistency of preparation was key to his game, and to a career largely free of major injury. Federer mastered ‘joindre l’utile a l’agreable, the conjoining of the necessary with the interesting / engaging. In his late teens, he briefly retained sed a performance psychologist prior to his breakthrough wins, which sits uneasily with his individualism.

Federer’s game is most comparable to Sampras; but the prior generation was far less likely to socialize together, and Federer enjoyed the demanding travel schedule. The arrival of Nadal, whose forte was the French clay and style more fiery and gritty, made for a rivalry that lifted both players. Djokovic, the latecomer, was more the master technician, always searching for a better approach. Federer’s claim to primes inter pares is his success at Wimbledon, the most elegant of the Grand Slam tournaments.

Federer piled up major tournament wins before the other two arrived, and can be criticized for collapsing in Slam finals. He never defeated both Nadal and Djokovic in a Grand Slam tournament.

Refreshingly free of hyperbole, Clarey’s sketch abounds with mostly unobtrusive personal interjections and includes a fair amount of tennis history. One wonders whether the introduction of the Hawkeye technology facilitated Federer’s grace?

The Premiership’s 3pm blackout

by kurto

The gross value of Premiership broadcast rights has continued rising, but includes more contests, raising the possibility that additional games might be shown in the 1500h window when lower-division clubs play. As these clubs depend on match-day revenues, violating the window may put lower division sides out of business.

Meanwhile, having cracked the US market, the Premiership’s overseas rights dwarf the continental leagues. The lowest English club makes more from TV’s league rights, approximately £150 million per annum – than Bayern Munich, AC Milan or Paris St Germain – all but Barcelona and Real Madrid.

The overall sense one gets is that the revenue squeeze is replacing three decades of a rising tide that lifted all footballing boats with a winner-takes-all environment in which the highly competitive and expertly marketed Premier League is the clear winner. At home that may endanger smaller English clubs. Abroad it jeopardises viable competition in continental tournaments, and will only put a tighter squeeze on other European clubs and leagues as international broadcasting revenues become the scarce resource.

In a market economy, runaway success creates its own problems.

https://www.ft.com/content/a0430c7a-c8b8-4ca4-b86f-803b369a3f46?segmentId=114a04fe-353d-37db-f705-204c9a0a157b

10. Zavos, How to Watch a Game of Rugby (2005)

by kurto

Individuals bring unique perspectives to watching rugby games, and the action catalyzes the group experience. In what amounts to a sports cultural essay, Zavos aims to broaden the horizons of that experience through selected history and vignette, but too much of the book is only tangentially related to the thesis. That said, there’s much relevance to the American game, which does not view test matches as its ne plus ultra. Includes an interesting timeline.

3. Coyle, Lance Armstrong’s War (27 Jan 2006)

by kurto

Reveals the performance requirements and culture of pro racing and the personality of Lance Armstrong. The author follows the Tour de France great through the 2004 season, when Armstrong won his record sixth consecutive title. Though Armstrong is often reviled for his competitiveness, it’s unclear why the habits that made him a champion become odious as he seeks to defend his stature. [The book and this summary were both prior to his exposure as a drugs cheat.] Armstrong largely gets a pass on rampant allegations of doping, and fair enough: innocent until proven guilty.

4. Cafferty, Suitcase Number Seven (16 Feb 2006)

by kurto

A biography, initially presented as a faux autobiography, detailing the 1950s rugby career and subsequent bachelorhood and alcohol-ravaged life of Munster scrumhalf Tom Cleary. Cleary was 17 times an Ireland replacement but never earned a cap in the era before substitutes; the author presents this shortfall as symbolic of Cleary’s travails after rugby — never reaching his potential. The title refers to Cleary’s 1960 tour of South Africa and Rhodesia, which places him a teammate of Syd Miller and Tony O’Reilly. Though depicted with great sympathy, the details of Cleary’s mature years are less interesting for rugby readers. The appendix is rich with statistics and match reports from Munster, Ireland, and the SA tour.

6. Lewis, Moneyball (2 Apr 2006)

by kurto

Follows the back-office management of the Oakland As’ 2002 season to uncover how the small-market team defies baseball’s conventional wisdom. For GM Billy Beane, on-base percentage (i.e., not making outs) is superior to any other statistical measurement, and players (especially minor leaguers) can be acquired at a significant discount (or sold at a premium) to the market’s valuation. Joe Morgan emerges as the arch defender of the status quo. One corollary that’s not addressed: if you don’t allow runs you can’t lose — defense wins championships after all.

19. Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (1 Oct 2023)

by kurto

Narrates the progression of football strategy as reflected in team formation, demonstrating various and evolving answers to the dichotomy of results versus aesthetics.

In the 19th century, solo dribbling defended by hacking coalesced into the forward-heavy 5-3-2. As northern UK teams began to challenge London, Scottish sides popularized close passing. As the game spread abroad through colonialism and trade, the pyramid became as the global default until 1925, when the offside rule changed to only 1 defending player behind the ball, after which the WM formation came in.

Why did football spread outside the empire?; but the book is mainly free of racist cant.

The history of tactics is encapsulated in the search for balancing defense and attack. The next innovation was Danubian, the ‘coffee house’ football of Austria, Hungary, and Germany, credited to the coaching tree of expatriate Jimmy Hogan. Contemporary forwards began dropping back or sitting deeper: more forwards make it more difficult to regain possession. The new inside left center came to be seen as more creative than the right center, so although numbering is not universal the number 10 became the playmaker.

English teams resisted the trend. Only much later, following 1953’s comprehensive defeat to Hungary, did the home of football see the modern game passing it by. Most countries have endured doubts of national strengths, whether technique or strength (brawn), and consequently looked abroad; yet Wilson sees England as unusually insular. During the 1960s, English orthodoxy lay in goals being scored in 3 or fewer passes. The author is highly critical of this ‘pseudo intellectual’ fad; but elsewhere suggests Dutch total football exemplifies the contemporary proximity of French postmodernism.

Selections are either for player quality (e.g., Brazil or Argentina) or fit within the system. No tactical system is so dour as the defensive Italian catenaccio of the 1960s. Hereafter, the book tends toward sketching national trajectories which illustrate tactical elaboration, often showing club coaches transitioning from domestic to cross-border or international competition. For example, the isolated teams of Peronist Argentina favored playmaking, the Dutch skipped the ‘WM’ formation as well as the pressures of early league tables. British emigres are often influential. Total football introduced the vertical (not lateral) interchange of positions. Dynamo Kiev’s Lobanovski saw that attack and defense relate not to position but possession.

1970’s World Cup, along with landing on the moon, was the first global TV event and also the last major tournament without pressing: Brazil’s playmakers were ideally suited. But the second striker became the fifth midfielder, upending the 4-4-2 and clogging the midfield. The shift underlined that defensive elements of innovation have often taken root more easily than the offensive, speaking to the rarity of individual skills. 1990’s outlawing the backpass and defensive challenges from behind marked the next major landmark. Who invented the 4-2-3-1 as it evolved over 1996-2000 cannot be established. Will the striker become obsolete?

The point of tactics is to multiply individual ability. Argentina, which reveres the 10, most evidences the struggle between defense and offense; but players can’t be effective 1-on-2. The greatest-ever sides have been 1954 Hungary, 1970 Brazil, 1974 Netherlands, late 1970s Milan.

6. Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered (20 Apr 2007)

by kurto

A well-researched and strongly narrated biography of iconic Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. The New Yorker’s rise to national prominence was slow, but included a playing career at then-powerful Fordham (where he was one of the ‘blocks of granite’) and coaching stints with Red Blaik’s Army and the New York Giants (alongside fellow assistant Tom Landry), such that his bloodlines were notable. Author Maraniss also notes often that Lombardi was friendly with many of the leading sportswriters / myth makers of the era — without saying whether that was product of his success or something he sought out. A stout Jesuit, Lombardi believed in presenting information at a pace so that the slowest in the group could understand, and in a menu of few plays with many options, drilled incessantly until execution was innate. The most famous of these was the sweep. At Green Bay, his success catapulted him into the realm of business leadership. The standard seven themes of his addresses: 1) pay the price, 2) the value of competition, 3) commitment to personal excellence, 4) more authority, less freedom (in reference to the tumultuous 1960s), 5) effective leaders are disciplined and impart that trait, 6) leaders are made, and most of all 7) character is a habit superimposed on temperament, and will is character in action. Maraniss cannot resist a bit of postmodern-inspired exploration of the gap between reality and popular understandings (or ‘myth’), as if this discord is not inevitably the case and indeed the very purpose of biography. A fine work on an interesting fellow.

7. Fanning, From There to Here (4 May 2007)

by kurto

An accessible tale of Ireland’s transition from staunchly amateur mediocrity to fourth in the world. Beginning with the disastrous Australian tour of 1994, the book revisits milestones of the next dozen years, demonstrating their resonance in the mid-2000s. Typically, each chapter treats one story as it unfolds over the course of a given season: the 1999 World Cup debacle, Eddie O’Sullivan’s rise to head, Munster’s 2006 Heineken Cup championship. Players, coaches, administrators often reflect on events in their own voice, complemented by Fanning’s vernacular. He is sympathetic to their views yet level in his evaluation, a noteworthy achievement. For the

    Sunday Independent

columnist, the real antagonists are management and administrators who haven’t thought their plans through, or don’t realize what is required. Why, for example, did the Irish union consider excluding Connacht from the program while continuing to spend hundred of thousands of pounds to send its leadership (and their wives) to away Six Nations games? Of course, most of Ireland’s hurdles have been more complicated. Fanning moves briskly, and like many journalists he is the more certain with the passage of time. The final chapters lose something of the work’s overall verve. This is a principal difference between news writers and historians, sometimes more willing to draw conclusions of events which the journalist views as still in progress. Should Ireland make an unprecedented run to the 2007 World Cup semifinals, it may be seen as the definitive account.

10. Krige, Right Place at the Wrong Time (27 June 2007)

by kurto

A capable but standard ghostwritten autobiography of Springbok hero Corne Krige. The account is most interesting for its narrative of South Africa’s infamous Kamp Staaldraad assembly prior to the 2003 World Cup. Krige, an Alan Solomons man, also acknowledges there were too many Japies at Northampton in 2004, which year sent the Saints spiraling toward relegation. Too little about SA schools rugby, but some interesting passages about prep school culture.