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Books -
Sport
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150 Heroes of Melbourne Melbourne Football Club
Garrie Hutchinson
Australian football kicked off 150 years ago with many of the players who went on to make and shape the game we know and love today. This book celebrates the Melbourne heroes of every era of that proud history – from the foundation days of Australian football in the 1850s, when Henry Harrison and Tom Wills kicked off the game; to the fi rst premiership, which starred the likes of Fred McGinis and Jack Purse; through to the exciting contemporary game starring giants such as Robert Flower, Garry Lyon, David Neitz, David Schwarz and Jim Stynes. Heroes have come in many forms. There was Bob Corbett, who inspired the team to a win in the 1926 preliminary fi nal against Essendon by coming onto the fi eld in the dying minutes with a broken jaw; and his team mate Jimmy
Abernethy, one of Melbourne’s best in the 1926 premiership, who in 1933, a year into retirement, still came to training – ‘Just having a run to keep in form in case I should be wanted.’
Name one, name them all – here are 150 Melbourne heroes chosen from more than 1200 players who have worn the red and the blue.
RRP $60.00, hardback
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Wisden Cricketers’ Almanac 2008 UK
Edited by Scyld Berry
The most famous sports book in the world, Wisden has been published every year since 1864. Wisden 2008, the 145th edition, contains coverage of every first-class game in every cricket nation, and reports and scorecards for all Tests and ODIs, including the 2007 World Cup and the death of Bob Woolme. In addition it contains the fi ve Cricketers of the Year, plus the greatest five never
chosen; tributes to retiring champions: Brian Lara by Mike Atherton, Adam Gilchrist by Ian Healy, Glenn McGrath by Robert Craddock; as well as a focus on Donald Bradman - the person behind the legend. Wisden offers more than just facts. It conveys the fl avour, the fun and the atmosphere. And with its unique mix of authority and sharpness, it puts the hype and the headlines into their true context. Trenchant opinion, compelling features and comprehensive records make it the cricketers’ bible worldwide. A perennial bestseller! Whenever cricket-lovers recall the glorious days of 2007/08, they will turn to the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2008: the essential companion for every
follower of cricket.
RRP $135.00, hardback |
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Kouta
By Anthony Koutoufides with Tony De Bolfo
Beginning his AFL career in 1992, ‘Kouta’ quickly established himself as one
of the most versatile and athletic players ever to play the game. Of Greek and Northern Italian heritage, Koutoufides made an early choice to switch from track and field athletics to Australian rules football. A pin-up boy not only at Carlton, in November 2006 won the final of Channel 7’s hit show Dancing with the Stars. Kouta has never been far from the news (his
reported $1 million contract caused a huge stir) but there have been very few players who could match Koutoufides’ sheer dominance in the late ‘90s, and at his best he is simply indestructible. Koutoufides was the Brownlow Medal favourite in 2000, the year in which he won the Leigh Matthews Trophy for the league’s Most Valuable Player, as chosen by the players. He won the Carlton Best & Fairest in 2001 & 2005, received All Australian honours in 1995 & 2000, and was one of the best on field in Carlton’s 1995 Grand Final win. He also played in Carlton pre-season premiership teams in 1997, 2005 and 2007.
Koutoufides has felt the exhilaration of the highs but also suffered the lows. He
was the was Carlton Captain during the tumultuous period between 2003-2006, when the club was in financial crisis, and twice finished bottom of the ladder. In Kouta, Anthony speaks candidly about his amazing football career, his life outside of football and how the game has changed during his time at the top.
RRP $34.95, hardback
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Mr Cricket
Driven to Succeed
By Mike Hussey with David Sygall
Cricket has been the heartbeat of Mike Hussey’s life since the age of 12, about the time that he found it more comfortable to bat left-handed than right. He adores the game, analyses it, researches it and respects it. Described as ‘Bradmanesque’, Hussey is the fastest batsmen ever to reach 1000 test runs, and he certainly knows a thing or two about how to put willow on leather. Since first donning the baggy green in early 2005, he has tormented opposition bowlers the world-over. Whether dashing English Ashes dreams at home or shining in one-day colours, Hussey is a batsman and cricketer of outstanding ability, versatility and class. But it wasn’t always this way. Few at his first club, Perth-based Wanneroo, rated the skinny and shy teenager. Mike was terrified and doubtful himself when first picked for their A side. He knew he had to gain weight, get stronger and practise. So he did. A lot. Endless hours of training and thousands of balls later Mike was ready to step up and be counted. The rest, as they say, is history. In this, his first ever book, Mike reveals how he made the transformation from talented teenager to sporting superhero, his remarkable passion for the game and exactly what makes him such a fierce, driven competitor. Packed with jaw-dropping facts and figures and illustrated with colour and black and white photographs, Mr Cricket is the unputdownable story of Mike Hussey and the essential cricket companion for 2007.
RRP $29.95, paperback |
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15 Days in June
How Australia Became a Football Nation
By Jesse Fink
In 2006 the Australian sporting landscape was transformed. Amongst all the hype, the Socceroos established themselves as a world-class team - proudly strutting their stuff at the biggest sporting event on earth and converting a legion of international fans along the way. 15 Days in June revisits that incredible journey – from penalty euphoria at Stadium Australia to last-minute Italian agony – and charts the legacy of this phenomenal achievement, both at home and abroad. 15 Days in June documents the giant leap that we've taken as a footballing nation, while also delving into the sport's fascinating, murky past.
June 2007, RRP $29.95, paperback
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Roy
Going For Broke
By Andrew Symonds with Stephen Gray
Andrew Symonds is one of Australia’s most popular and entertaining cricketers. Famous for his dreadlocks, his zinc-plastered lips and his powerful hitting, Roy is the kind of character that everyone in the game loves. While his ability to turn one-day games has long been lauded, Roy finally launched himself in the Test arena with an impressive 156 against England in the Boxing Day Ashes Test in Melbourne. Packed with jaw-dropping facts and figures, funny anecdotes and tall tales (from on and off the field) and fully illustrated with colour and black and white photographs throughout, Roy: Going for Broke is the unputdownable story of Andrew Symonds and the essential cricket companion for 2007. This B format edition includes an extra chapter on the Ashes campaign, in which Roy witnessed Australia retain the 2006/07 Ashes first-hand, as well as Shane Warne’s 700th wicket and the teary farewells ofMcGrath, Langer and Warne’s teary farewell to cricket at the SCG, not to mention his own break through 156 in the Boxing Day Test.
RRP $22.95, paperback |
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Roy - Going for Broke
By Andrew Symonds with Stephen Gray
Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds brings gusto to whatever he does, whether firing down offbreaks or mediums, hurling his ungainly bulk round the outfield or vigorously ruffling the bowler's hair at the celebration of a wicket. He saves his loudest grunt for his batting, where he is an unabashed six-hitter in the mould of a George Bonnor or a Colin Milburn or a David Hookes. Packed with jaw-dropping facts and figures, funny anecdotes and tall tales (from on and off the field) and fully illustrated with colour and b&w photographs throughout, Roy: Going for broke is the unputdownable story of Andrew Symonds and the essential cricket companion for 2006.
RRP $29.95, paperback
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Wisden History of the Cricket World Cup
Edited by Tony Cozier
Foreword by Clive Lloyd
The ninth Cricket World Cup is being staged in the West Indies during March and April 2007. Wisden has covered all eight World Cups to date in its usual comprehensive and authoritative manner. Edited by Tony Cozier, the renowned and respected West Indian cricket commentator and journalist, the Wisden History of the Cricket World Cup mixes original Wisden reports with new material to provide perspective. The foreword is written by Clive Lloyd who, as captain of the West Indies in 1975, was the first man to raise the cup. Illustrated throughout with colour pictures by cricket’s leading photographer, Patrick Eagar, this book will enable cricket-lovers around the world to relive the excitement of one of the greatest tournaments in sport.
RRP $49.95, hardback |
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Wisden Anthology 1978-2006
Cricket’s age of revolution
Edited by Stephen Moss
In the early 1980s Wisden published four anthologies that celebrated the best of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack stretching back to its first edition in 1864. Edited by the respected jazz musician, raconteur and cricket-lover, Benny Green, these volumes proved very popular. Rather than selecting random highlights, Stephen Moss has edited this anthology with the aim of painting a coherent picture of cricket’s evolution over the past 30 years. Quite simply it is a story of revolution, beginning in Test cricket’s centenary year when England regained the Ashes, Geoffrey Boycott scored his hundredth hundred, Ian Botham took five for 74 on debut, and Kerry Packer’s millions ensured the era of deferential players earning a pittance was over for good.
RRP $69.95, hardback
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This Sporting Year
The very best in words and pictures
Edited by Garrie Hutchinson
From the excitement of the Ashes to the thrill of the Socceroos’ performance at the World Cup, 2005–2006 has been an epic adventure for sports lovers.
Combining the crème de la crème of sportswriters in Australia – Gideon Haigh on the Ashes, John Harms on the Stawell Gift smokie, Les Carlyon on Makybe Diva, Martin Flanagan on the Sydney Swans, Jesse Fink on the Socceroos, Peter Roebuck on the Windies, Roy Masters on rugby league, among many others – along with a selection of the very best colour photos from agencies around the world, This Sporting Year is a landmark sports publication in every sense.
RRP $39.95, paperback |
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Blue Heaven
By Murray Walding
Australians have always had an affinity with surfing and the beach, and crowds flocked to Aussie surf beaches as long ago as the late eighteen hundreds. ‘Victorian’ attitudes to decorum and displays of flesh never hindered the country’s love of the beach and over the next hundred years, surfing, surf shooting and sunbaking became a defining aspect of Aussie culture. Fully illustrated throughout with fantastic surfing shots as well as memorabilia, Blue Heaven celebrates the heroics of surf life saving, the sixties boom of surfboard riding and the transition of surfing from a lifestyle to a bustling energetic industry. All the greats such as Midget Farrelly, Pam Burridge, Tom Carroll, Gary Elkerton, Rabbit Bartholomew, Layne Beachley and Nat Young are in the book. Blue Heaven tells the story of Australian surfing from its origins as a sunny beach time activity, through its era as a renegade sport and on to its acceptance as a mainstream sport and lifestyle.
RRP $34.95, paperback
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Global Surf Nation
Surfing the world
Written by Chris Moran
Global Surf Nation is not just another book about surfing. Surfing has changed in the last decade; it has evolved. The majority of people surfing and following the sport today are not in it for the money or the adulation – they are involved because they love the water, they love the waves and they love the feeling they get when they’re out on a board. Surfing gives the type of freedom you cannot experience from a group sport or any other solo exercise. Instead of page after page of dull photography featuring another surfer on yet another breaker, GlobalSurfNation looks further than just the rider and the board. Underwater shots, rare locations and stunning action photography are all inside. The text accompanies the reader on the journey through the world of surf, explaining why surfers surf, why they choose where they surf and what they get out of the sport.
RRP $34.95, paperback |
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The Golfer's Companion
The essential Australian guide to golf rules, competitions, scoring and betting games
By Damien Davis and Scott Blackman
Every golf book out there is the same. Endless ‘how-to’ information on stance, grip and swing, with a few pretty pictures thrown in. Not The Golfer’s Companion. This pocket-sized Australian guide crisply and simply presents the rules of golf. How to calculate your handicap. How to score popular competitions like Stableford, Match Play and Par. And how to play fun gambling games like Skins, Drinks and Split Sixes. With over 20,000 copies sold, The Golfer’s Companion is a proven winner, and a must-have for experienced and novice players alike.
RRP $12.95, paperback
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Darren Lehmann
Worth the wait
By Darren Lehmann
One of Australian cricket’s biggest names and most entertaining characters, Darren Lehmann talks candidly about his life – friends, enemies, team mates, tragedies, regrets and the incredible highs and lows of an astounding career in cricket – in this refreshingly honest and engaging autobiography. Lehmann draws the reader back to those first games of street cricket with local kids in Gawler, South Australia, to turning down an early offer to join the Australian Cricket Academy (much to the horror of some), and relives the thrill of being picked to play for Australia for the first time, only to have his hopes dashed and be named 12th man at the last minute. In one of Australian cricket’s most fascinating stories, eight years would pass before Lehmann would be picked to play for his country again. And long years they were; this was the limbo period that fuelled the long-standing belief that Lehmann irked officialdom by choosing his own path instead of the one they laid out for him.
RRP $19.95, paperback |
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The Footy Show Joke Book 2
By
Trevor Marmalade
Trevor Marmalade, The Footy Show's much-loved and infamous comedian, is back with another collection of his best jokes and funniest moments from the past five years. No one is spared – players, umpires, coaches and managers all cop a ribbing – as Trevor places Australia's greatest code under the microscope.
A Collingwood supporter, a moron and a dole bludger walk into the war. And that was just the first bloke.
In coaching news, Richmond has given Terry Wallace five years. The last four to be served concurrently.
Not many people at the Geelong v Melbourne match. In fact, after the game the players invaded the crowd.
Not just a book of classic one liners, but a comic history of the modern game.
RRP $24.95, paperback
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Any
Old Eleven
By Jim Young
Any Old Eleven recalls the experiences of the spectacularly
incompetent cricket team, the NOBs (Naughton's Old Boys) - a
collection of eccentric but likeable characters who played during
the late-1970s and 1980s before sinking into cricket oblivion.
Their passion for cricket, beer and life, along with humorous
accounts of on-field 'incidents', non-regulation uniforms and
athletic disasters will have you laughing out loud.
'Jim Young's Any Old Eleven is the funniest book on cricket
in the whole of my reading - and possibly on any subject matter.
It is unequivocally a comic masterpiece' J. Turner,
Pavilion magazine
RRP
$22.95, paperback |
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The Away Game
The secret lives of Australia's soccer superstars
By
Matthew Hall
In November 2005, in front of a capacity crowd in Sydney, John Aloisi scored a goal that changed sporting history. But behind that kick are the countless untold stories of Australia’s soccer superstars. For the past 30 years, overseas clubs offering huge pay packets have lured away our best talent. Some dreams came true. Others crashed and burned. Rip-offs, death threats, drugs, guns, corrupt officials . . . This is often the reality of life in the top leagues of European football. Matthew Hall has been reporting on ‘the world game’ for over a decade, meeting everyone from past legends and struggling nobodies to multimillion-dollar heroes such as Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka. The result is The Away Game, a collection of revealing, funny and often controversial stories that lifts the lid on the secret lives of the players, administrators, agents and coaches in the world’s most popular sport.
‘Part travelogue, part investigative journalism, and written with a real passion, The Away Game gets beyond the headlines and into the heart of our place in the world game.’ FHM MAGAZINE
RRP $29.95, paperback
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Blood Sports
The inside dope on drugs in sport
By Robin Parisotto
Coincidence or cover-up? Between 1987 and 1990, eighteen professional athletes died. Some while competing, some while sleeping. All from heart failure. Why? The answer was EPO – a lethal new drug designed to increase oxygen – but you wouldn't have known it at the time. While steroids and other performance enhancers were prominent in the public conscience and had a long and infamous history, EPO was the 'wonder' drug nobody talked about – and for which no sport authority wanted a test. It wasn't until 1999 taht the International Olympic Committee got serious about fighting EPO, and Robin Parisotto, a researcher at the AIS, was their weapon of choice. Implemented at the 2000 Sydney Olymic Games and hailed as the biggest anti-doping breakthrough in over thirty years, Parisotto's groundbreaking EPO test was the culmination of an extraordinary journey along the cutting edge of research, and at the highest levels of international sport. Blood Sports is a gripping and provocative insider's look at the issue of drugs in sport.
RRP
$24.95, paperback
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Rammer
Jammer Yellow Hammer
A journey into the heart of fan mania
By
Warren St. John
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is an energetic, eye-opening
and often hilarious investigation of the way in which sport can
turn perfectly sane people into screaming lunatics, willing to
sacrifice almost anything for their team. In search of an explanation,
Warren St. John embarks on a four month road trip with the roving
motor home community who follows the Crimson Tide American football
team during the season. After procuring a van he is welcomed into
a world of bad keg beer, ticket scalping and people who find it
perfectly acceptable to miss a daughters wedding if it clashes
with a game. Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is not only a
travel story, but a cultural anthropology of fans that goes a
long way toward demystifying the universal urge to take sides
and win.
RRP $24.95, paperback
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Darren
Lehmann
Worth the Wait
By Darren Lehmann
One of Australian cricket's biggest names and most entertaining
characters, Darren Lehmann talks candidly about his life - friends,
enemies, team mates, tragedies, regrets and the incredible highs
and lows of an astounding career in cricket - in this refreshingly
honest and engaging autobiography. Two World Cup triumphs, a notorious
outburst that saw him banned amid a media frenzy, missing the
opening matches of the 2003 World Cup, the tragic death of his
close friend David Hookes, and countless centuries and now long-overdue
recognition as one of the most powerful batsmen in this current
Australian side make Darren Lehmann's story an absolutely fascinating
one. He has it all: Experience. Talent. Fire. Knowledge. Trust.
And plenty of dues.
RRP
$35.00, hardback
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Red,
White & Black
By
Ken Piesse
2004 was the year of the Saints. To not celebrate it would be
a sin. The Maestro. The Young Gun. The Prodigy. The G-Train. Each
of these superstars - Robert Harvey, Nick Riewoldt, Brenden Goddard
and Fraser Gehrig - have combined to make St Kilda the glamour
team of the AFL in 2004, and all of them (and the rest of the
team) find a place in Red, White & Black. Timed to celebrate the
most successful home and away season in St Kilda's long history
- record attendances, 10 consecutive victories, and a great finals
campaign - this compact, colourful paperback takes a look at some
of the key people and moments of the club's past, before going
on to profile the players who are making for such a successful
present. Dual Brownlow Medallist Robert Harvey has supplied the
foreword.
RRP
$22.95, paperback
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Footy
in the 1960s
Edited by Michael Roberts amd Michael
Winkler
The 1960s was a decade when fans got to see some of the game's
biggest names, some of its most famous matches and incidents,
a succession of memorable grand finals - and the true 'arrival'
of television. TV hit big time in the 1960s, and when it did it
made stars of the players - we got closer to both the players
and the game than ever before. Footy in the 1960s gives complete
coverage of each year, as well as having 'club' chapters, which
are vivid personal accounts written by a high-profile fans who
were there for all the great games and legendary moments.
RRP
$29.95, hardback
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Endless
Summer
140 Years of Wisden in Australia
Edited by Gideon Haigh
It is well known that the publication of the first edition of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack was more than the minting of a distinguished imprint; it manifested the emergence of a record-keeping instinct in the game, now taken for granted, but intrinsic to its sense of continuity and context. Endless Summer concerns itself with how Wisden has, distantly but diligently, followed and featured Australian cricket over the last 140 years. It also contains subtler traces of another story, of how the coverage of Australian cricket has both reflected and contributed to Wisden's fortunes in that time.
RRP
$19.95, paperback |
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