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Michael Lewis

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Hardcover – May 10, 2003

by Michael Lewis (Author)

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"One of the best baseball―and management―books out.... Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."―Forbes

Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).

I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it―before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?

With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities―his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission―but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers―numbers!―collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors.

What these geek numbers show―no, prove―is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.

Billy paid attention to those numbers ―with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to―and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.

In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win... how can we not cheer for David?

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

May 10, 2003
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
ISBN-10

0393057658
ISBN-13

978-0393057652
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Popular Highlights in this book

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There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t.
2,123 Kindle readers highlighted this
That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone.
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“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than pick a strategy that is most efficient,” said Palmer. “The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.

Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly

Lewis (Liar's Poker; The New New Thing) examines how in 2002 the Oakland Athletics achieved a spectacular winning record while having the smallest player payroll of any major league baseball team. Given the heavily publicized salaries of players for teams like the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees, baseball insiders and fans assume that the biggest talents deserve and get the biggest salaries. However, argues Lewis, little-known numbers and statistics matter more. Lewis discusses Bill James and his annual stats newsletter, Baseball Abstract, along with other mathematical analysis of the game. Surprisingly, though, most managers have not paid attention to this research, except for Billy Beane, general manager of the A's and a former player; according to Lewis, "[B]y the beginning of the 2002 season, the Oakland A's, by winning so much with so little, had become something of an embarrassment to Bud Selig and, by extension, Major League Baseball." The team's success is actually a shrewd combination of luck, careful player choices and Beane's first-rate negotiating skills. Beane knows which players are likely to be traded by other teams, and he manages to involve himself even when the trade is unconnected to the A's. " `Trawling' is what he called this activity," writes Lewis. "His constant chatter was a way of keeping tabs on the body of information critical to his trading success." Lewis chronicles Beane's life, focusing on his uncanny ability to find and sign the right players. His descriptive writing allows Beane and the others in the lively cast of baseball characters to come alive.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Unlike professional football and basketball, Major League Baseball has no cap on the amount of money a team can spend on its players, which makes it nearly impossible for "small market" clubs to compete with the behemoths in Gotham and L.A. On the other hand, as Lewis shows us in his engaging saga of the Oakland Athletics, there are always ways to win on the cheap. The hero of Lewis' tale is Oakland General Manager Billy Beane, a bust as a player but a deft judge of talent. Lewis was granted what appears to be unlimited access--he often found himself in the Oakland executive offices when a big trade was going down--and his book reads like it. He also does a wonderful job of picking the brains and explaining the motives of the baseball statistics geeks who are helping redefine the way the game will be played in the twenty-first century. With so many baseball books to choose from, it is difficult to single out a few as must-haves, but this one comes pretty close. Kevin Canfield
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"The single most influential baseball book ever."
― Rob Neyer, Slate

"Another journalistic tour de force."
― Wall Street Journal

"Engaging, informative, and deliciously contrarian."
― Washington Post

"Anyone who cares about baseball must read Moneyball."
― Newsweek

"An extraordinary job of reporting and writing."
― San Jose Mercury News

"You have to read Moneyball.... Amazing anecdotes... an entertaining, enlightening read."
― Baseball America

"Ebullient, invigorating... provides plenty of action, both numerical and athletic, on the field and in the draft-day war room."
― Time

"One of the most enjoyable baseball books in years."
― New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (May 10, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393057658
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393057652
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.26 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #86,382 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #24 in Sports Industry
- #132 in Baseball (Books)
- #1,225 in Business Management (Books)

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Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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The Huntington Book Depository

Michael Lewis at his best

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2020

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It's hard to sit down and write something about a book that already has 1700+ reviews. But I bought this book when it first came out and have reread it several times since then, so feel I owe it to the book to say how well done it is. The baseball component of the book has been reviewed to death - it's certainly a great story about the Oakland A's, their unusual approach to statistics under general manager Billy Beane, and how that garnered them successes in the win/loss department despite a low payroll. Lewis does an engaging job as always of laying out an unusual cast of characters, their backstories, and their rag tag group against the world narrative sprinkled with a bunch of recognizable baseball players along for the ride.

But when you pair this book with Lewis' other writings, particularly those related to the financial sector, you start to see a familiar pattern or a deeper meaning which I didn't appreciate until recently - the data (whether financial, or baseball-related in this case) is out there in the world for everyone to see, but oftentimes it takes a unique individual or radical perspective to see that data differently and try to work some efficiencies from it that everyone else in the industry has overlooked. So it has taught me through my life to 1) even if you're not a math guy, you need to appreciate and try to understand the statistics in your life/industry, and 2) oftentimes there's a creative way to approach the data that will unlock some benefits. It's just a matter of thinking about where those efficiencies lie.

So read it as a great baseball story, or a book on statistics, or just as a great read on its own. But certainly worth your money and time to pick up a copy and give it a read. Highly recommend!

25 people found this helpful

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N. Tuzov

Is worth reading even if you couldn't care less for baseball

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2014

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I decided to read this book after I got a nagging feeling that I am the only statistician in the US who hasn't read it. This review is aimed at those who are interested in quantitative performance evaluation or quantitative modeling in general.

First, I'd like to thank Lewis for a book that is worth reading even for someone who has never learned the rules of the game and never will. Even if I had had a glimmer of interest in baseball per se before I read the book, it would have been extinguished for good anyway (read on to learn why).

According to Lewis, for about a hundred years American baseball existed as a peculiar social club composed of GMs, scouts, baseball writers and commentators, and players who would often become one of the former. The first reason why The Club was special was that it was rarely run as a business. Consider Walter Haas, a former owner of Oakland Athletics. Haas was a great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss and coincidentally served as CEO of Levi Strauss & Co for almost 20 years. He was not shy of giving it back to the American society or at least to the most indispensable part of it, professional baseball players. As a result, in 1991 Oakland A's enjoyed the highest payroll in baseball while losing money for the owner. Unfortunately, that commendable manifestation of social responsibility was halted in 1995 when the new owners switched to a pro-business stance and slashed the payroll drastically.

The new goal for the GM became to keep the team in the major league, while minimizing the ratio of payroll to the number of wins. The quest for how to run the most cost-effective team resulted in a number of fascinating discoveries. First, consider the process of drafting young players from high schools and colleges. The old scouts were used to some glaringly subjective player selection criteria, such as how cool the player's body looks ("selling jeans") or how concordant his facial features are with a great future in baseball ("The Good Face"). The "internal compass of an old baseball guy", directed them to look at the player and "imagine what he might become". They believed that they could judge and predict the player's performance simply by watching him. To be fair, the old school scouting worked fine but only assuming that the team's pockets were very deep. Indeed, that was often the case thanks to Walter Haas and other individuals who possessed similar amounts of wealth and social responsibility.

Of course, different stats (foot speed, batting average, etc) were also considered, but none of the old guard had the desire, ability or means to assess how predictable such metrics are given the current information about the player. For instance, do young power hitters tend to develop precision over time or not? Are the stats of a high school player informative enough or does it make sense to ignore them and focus on the college players who have a longer history? Are there metrics that confuse skill and luck and contain no useful information even about the past performance, let alone the future?

Further, suppose the future values of a measurable characteristic (e.g. foot speed, fastball velocity) can be predicted well, and we are fairly certain that luck and skill are not mixed up. So far so good, but exactly how much does that particular skill contribute to the ultimate objective, winning a game at the lowest cost? Say, if the future foot speed of the player is guaranteed to be as good as it has been, how much the team should be willing to pay for the player? If the answer is known, the GM can then perform some arbitrage by selling players whose characteristics are overpriced and buying those whose characteristics are underpriced.

It may appear strange that those questions were not raised and addressed until after Billy Beane became the GM of Oakland Athletics in 1997. Apart from the philanthropic attitude of the team owners, there were other reasons why. Before the late 1970s, quantitative analysis of baseball data was both hard for the lack of computers and impractical because the players' salaries were not that high. Most importantly, the eventual adoption of quantitative performance evaluation methods revealed that the baseball data are extremely noisy. To extract some useful insights, one has to generalize from a large body of stats that no living scout or other baseball insider can keep in his head. Likewise, to see whether a given quantitative approach does (not) work, it's not enough to follow the career of a single player or observe the outcome of a single game.

That nourished the perception that quantitative metrics are more or less useless and recoursing to one's "internal compass" works better when it's time to draft players and then decide how (not) to use them during the game. An example of such attitude is the scouts' belief that "if you see it once, it's there", which is a ringing endorsement of making a decision based on the sample size of one. Given how much the outcome of anything that happens on the field depends on luck, that's a kiss of death for good scouting, or at least for a cost-effective version of it.

Undoubtedly, baseball teams vary in skill, but, according to the book, the contribution of skill to the outcome of an average game is about four times less than the contribution of luck. In particular, the number of games in playoffs is so small that luck doesn't cancel out: in a series of five games, the worst team in the major league has a 15% chance to beat the best team. Because a team that loses in the playoffs cannot get the coveted World Series title it creates another psychological incentive for having little faith in the quantitative approach. To me it also means that if all of the noise were to disappear (and that's what "sabermetrics" is trying to achieve), the game would become far less fun to watch and talk about. There is not much thrill in observing how a slightly biased coin is flipped. Isn't that another reason why both the insiders and fans preferred to stick to the old ways instead of embracing the "performance scouting" and other insights offered by sabermetrics? If that's the case then The Club turns out to be far more rational and efficient than Lewis portrayed.

Next, I'd like to explore the most important point made by Lewis: bad as they may have been, the baseball statistics were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the performance of people in many other lines of work, so ...? What immediately comes to my mind are the "scouting" (hiring) practices of Microsoft and Google that included the so-called brainteaser interviews that were administered for 10 to 20 years (see Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? and How Would You Move Mount Fuji? ). To me it has always been clear that being good at brainteasers does not predict one's future job performance unless the job amounts to solving brainteasers. Both companies banned the practice in the end, even though some copycats are still lurking around. The point, however, is why it lasted for as long as it did. Apparently, the engineers at Microsoft and Google are no fools. They figured out that the brainteasers fail at achieving their purported objective many years ago. Why continue to use them, then? Moneyball provides a plausible explanation. Companies are not only about doing business but sometimes about being a certain social club. The club entry requirements can be as arbitrary as anything. If they appear, to put it mildly, irrational, that is to be expected every now and then. Therefore, the real question is not "Are you smart enough to work at Google?" but "Are you a good fit for the Google social club?". Regardless of what the answer is, it has nothing to do with one's intelligence or the absence thereof.

Now back to baseball. If you have some quantitative background I could highly recommend "Stein's Paradox in Statistics", a paper published by Prof. Efron in 1977 (incidentally, that was the year Bill James published his first Baseball Abstract). The rather ancient article is quite in line with what I learned from Moneyball: the amount of noise in the baseball stats is substantial and the players are a lot more similar to each other than it appears to the public and even the insiders. It looks like my background in Statistics, combined with what I learned from the book, made it impossible to enjoy the game the way millions of fans do. Nevertheless, I managed to derive a lot of value from Moneyball and I wish you the same.

52 people found this helpful

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Henry Bemis

Eye-opening and Jawdropping!

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2019

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Like many people, I imagine, I bought this book shortly after seeing the movie. As a long time baseball fan it was eyeopening and jawdropping. As much as I love the movie, the book is so much better. I'd always been led to believe that the powers to be in baseball had a method to their madness. But no. It's just madness. Some people would just rather believe the lie than to face the truth. Even if it saves them a fortune. The saddest part of the book for me was reading the nonsense spewing from the mouth of one of my childhood heros, Joe Morgan. A true NON-believer. I was a fan of the vaunted Big Red Machine back in the 70's, and Joe Morgan was the leader of that team. A hugely intelligent man, but obviously one of those brilliant egotists who once they get to a certain age refuse to believe they have anything left to learn. And thus make themselves completely irrelevant. Because anyone who still refutes the lessons this book has to teach MLB is the same sort of idiot who denies climate change in the face of all the facts. The truth will set you free, but apparently some people prefer to live in bondage.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

sgh100

this is a great book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 29, 2020

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This book was recommended to me by a friend, probably 4-5 years ago, and, despite not being a fan of baseball, I thought the book was excellent. I've heard a few people say that you really have to understand baseball before you can enjoy the sport (rather than the occasion of drinking weak beer in a stadium with friends), and I do think that's probably true. Having read this book I do have a new appreciation for the sport but the best thing about it is the story and the characters, all of which are, unbelievably, "real".

I'd never heard of Billy Beane, but he sounds like a very interesting guy, a smart guy and a great leader. I particularly like the story of someone who is willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, and he very much did that. The other thing that is really interesting is that he, himself, was given a shot at the big leagues based on the "hokum" of what a ball player should look like, and in defiance of what his stats were saying when he was signed as a player. Despite the pain which it maybe caused him, he purposefully turned his back on picking stars based on the "hokum" approach and went looking for players who did not "look like" him, i.e. weren't natural born athletes, didn't look good in uniform, didn't get the scouts excited, etc, etc. It's a rare quality to go looking for people who don't look like you.

The main thing to love though is the story about how "baseball insider wisdom" (on everything from picking players in the draft to the strategy of winning games to negotiating trades with other teams) was challenged by those outside baseball, but no one from within baseball, except for Beane and the Oakland As, was ever willing to put it to the test. Beane took this body of knowledge, further developed it, and then implemented it, and to great effect. His team, despite its small budget, was very successful over a long enough period of time to prove the point. It's almost impossible to imagine all the pro teams in any other sport, worldwide, ignoring so much data on how things could be done better, and for so long.

Now, I'm going to watch the movie.

4 people found this helpful

Peter L. Hurst

Behavioual economics case study

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 5, 2012

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Moneyball is ostensibly a book about Baseball, superfIcially a book about the Oakland A's (equivalent of Bolton Wanderers under Sam Allardyce) and their General Manager (equivalent of a 'Director of football') Billy Beane in the late 90's/early Noughties and how a club with scarce financial resources consistently out-performed its more wealthy rivals and it is! But it is so much more than that, this book has more layers than an onion.

On one level this is a book about Baseball and a maverick who subverted the consensus view on how the game should be played and understood but on a deeper level this is a case study of an idea. It is behavioural economics as applied to sport.

The book demonstrates how Billy Beane used the insights of a Baseball statistician named Bill James (a cipher for Nobel winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, author of 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'?) and the practical mathematical genius of Paul Podesta (a Harvard graduate with no Baseball experience) to outsmart his competitors.

'Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to Baseball...... Paul wanted to look at stats because the stats offered offered him new ways of understanding.....That was James's most general point: the naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games.'

On one level level this is an old-fashioned David vs Goliath story but on a deeper level it is a book about two competing views of human nature. The view being triumphed in this book is that of 'behavioural economics.' In short, that human beings are inherently irrational. Trusting one's gut, or intuition, is inherently flawed and is subject to systematic biases/limitations/flaws/illusions which can only be rooted out by a sophisticated analysis of relevant statistical data.

The author Michael Lewis is really an economics writer and what he has managed to do is something that many writers (including Daniel Kahneman, whose writings in my opinion tend to be turgid in the extreme) seem unable to do, and that is:- make seemingly complex ideas come alive by embedding them in real-life situations with real people. Moneyball is a great sports book but it is also popular social science writing at its finest too.

19 people found this helpful

Gs-trentham

A new way of adding up the numbers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2011

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In 1990 I fulfilled a long-standing ambition and went to the first two games of the World Series. Cincinatti Reds were on their way to sweeping the Oakland As. The previous year, the As had won the Series for the ninth time, a total still exceeded only by the New York Yankees and the St Louis Cardinals. But in the 21 years since that defeat the World Series hasn't seen the As again.

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis suggests a simple explanation: the game's finances had gone stratospheric, leaving the As unable to compete for the superstars. At the same time, he explains how they remained seriously competitive without going bankrupt: they disregarded the gut instincts of scouts immersed in subjective assessment of players, adopting instead an analysis of statistics weighted in favour of certain key elements.

At first, the book looks at how and why the analysis worked, but it evolves into the story of a single season when it was the essential rationale that governed the way Oakland identified and signed players. So it becomes a human story, focussing on the unlikely heroes out on the diamond and on the General Manager who believes implicitly in the information emerging from the computer of his Number Two. The General Manager is Billy Beane, a former player who should have been a star but never quite made it, and is now a quixotic leader who prefers to be somewhere else when his team is playing. It will be a hard-hearted reader who fails to empathise with Beane as the season unfolds. Never mind the mathematics, the book is worth reading if only to sit beside him while he trades away his best players in order to sign unrated others.

Lewis doesn't claim that the As found a one-size-fits-all infallible blueprint; unarguably, several million dollars into the annual bank balance of a Barry Bonds, an A-Rod or a Jeter make for an interesting alternative. Moneyball, really, is simply a one-off example of brilliant sports writing by an author whose true beat is big business. In this edition, Lewis unfortunately, cannot resist an appendix to deal with a faction in baseball that decries his efforts. He should have let the book speak for itself. It is certainly good enough.

2 people found this helpful

Kuma

A home run

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2011

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Michael Lewis is better known for his books giving an insider's view into the world of high finance and economics so knocking out a book on baseball may seem somewhat incongruous. However, a few pages in and the parallels between the two subjects seem suspiciously close - like Liar's Poker and The Big Short and their investors trying to make a killing on the markets by staying ahead of the game using information and careful blagging, Moneyball tracks cash-strapped baseball team the Oakland Athletics and their unconventional manager Billy Beane as they successfully compete against the wealthy teams by careful analysis of players' statistics and doing the complete opposite of what is generally expected. Picking up a rag-tag line-up of players that don't look the part for knockdown salaries - fat kids, kids that throw funny, kids that are scared to hit the ball, older players thought past their prime - they give the multi-million dollar players more than a run for their money, continually defying the odds season after season to finish near the top. This is a book packed both with wit and fascinating insight into the science of baseball (you don't need to be an enthusiast to start with but you may end up being one at the end!) and a very engrossing read, highly recommended!

I would suggest trying to pick up the edition with the "new afterword" which discusses the response to the book from the "baseball industry" which treated as arrogant bragadocio from writer Billy Beane, totally missing that it wasn't actually written by Mr Beane and was hardly boastful or arrogant. The baseball industry - the writers, scouts, managers etc - continues to perpetuate their myths even as other smaller teams (and some of the bigger teams) adopt the A's modus operandi with similar successful results.

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griff1974

A gripping read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 23, 2013

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I came to this book through seeing, and really enjoying, the film. I found the film thought provoking, well portrayed, and brilliantly acted, and the book lived up to that level of expectation.

I'm not a baseball fan but rather a sports fan in general. You don't need an in-depth knowledge of baseball but a background awareness of at least the phraseology would be an advantage. If you love sport but are happy to occasionally have a wry smile to yourself about the nonsensical way it sometimes operates, then this is a great book for you.

The writing style is easy and engaging, and portrays the characters in a way that would make a writer of fiction proud. This may owe as much to the people themselves as to the author, but the two are merged seamlessly. The narrative moves along smoothly and is an easy and gripping read.

Any reader of sport-related books will enjoy this, but don't be put off if this isn't your usual genre and give it a go.

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