Showing titles in Sports & Outdoors

In 1985, 40 hooligan followers of Stoke City FC experienced a riotous trip to Portsmouth - and the Naughty 40 was born. It became one of the most notorious soccer gangs in Britain. Mark Chester was a founder member of the N40. Already a hardened fighter, he had been expelled from school after an unsettled childhood and joined the Staffordshire Regiment, only to be discharged for misconduct. Stoke City's emerging "casual" mob became his family. "Right or wrong, I was ready to be a committed football hooligan," he says.

Between 2012 and 2023, Ian Graham worked as Liverpool FC's Director of Research. His tenure coincided with the club’s greatest period of success since the 1980s, including winning the Premier League in 2020 – Liverpool’s first league title after an agonising 29 years. Here for the first time, Graham reveals the fascinating data that informed some of the club’s most pivotal moments of the past decade, from the appointment of Jurgen Klopp as manager in 2015 to the signing of Mohamed Salah in 2017.

Journeying from Abu Dhabi to Newcastle, and onto London, Paris, Moscow and New York in search of the answers, Miguel Delaney follows the threads that surround the allegations of sportswashing and misconduct in the beautiful game. The result is an exploration of how European football clubs have been bought by some of the world's wealthiest businessmen and state-backed corporations. Drawing on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to key stakeholders, Miguel has produced an all-encompassing exposé of modern footballs highest echelons.

Between the years 2012 and 2019, Sir Steve Hansen oversaw an era of such remarkable success that it would be almost impossible to repeat. His 15-year career in the All Blacks coaching team is the heaviest footprint in rugby history. Of the 210 tests he was involved with, his team lost just 25 times. Of the 107 tests he served as head coach, Sir Steve accumulated a record 4 World Rugby Coach of the Year awards and orchestrated 93 victories - a winning percentage of 87 per cent, the highest of any All Blacks coach.

Football has always measured success by what you win, but only in the last twenty years have clubs started to think about how you win. Data has now suffused almost every aspect of how football is played, coached, scouted and consumed. But it’s not the algorithms or new metrics that have made this change, it’s the people behind them. This is the story of modern football’s great data revolution and the group of curious, entrepreneurial personalities who zealously believed in its potential to transform the game.

The mental game may be more important in poker than in any other form of competition. It's one of the only games in the world where you can play perfectly and lose-again and again. Hundreds of poker players have turned to mental game coach Jared Tendler's revolutionary approach to help them play their best, no matter how badly they're running. In this book you'll find simple, step-by-step instructions and proven techniques to permanently fix problems such as tilt, handling variance, emotional control, confidence, fear, and motivation.

Award-winning sports journalist Scott Howard-Cooper uncovers the fascinating life story of a basketball legend. Kerr did not follow a traditional path to the NBA. He was born in Beirut to two academics and split his childhood between California and the Middle East. Though he was an impressive shooter, the undersized Kerr garnered almost no attention from major college programs, managing only at the last moment to snag the final scholarship at the University of Arizona.

As a young girl growing up in a strict ultra-Orthodox family, Dassi's life was preordained - marry young, live a devout life and raise children within the Adass community's religious rules. This righteous path would keep her safe from the immodest, secular world just a few blocks away in suburban Melbourne. But the Adass community was not safe for Dassi. She was fifteen when her revered school principal, Malka Leifer, started to single her out. Dassi's cloistered and harsh upbringing meant she didn't have the words for what was happening to her, but she knew it was very, very wrong.

From the battlefields of Homer's Iliad, where muscles first entered world literature, to the Victorian-era gymnasiums where women built strength and muscle by lifting heavy weights, to a retirement home in Boston, where a young doctor discovered that training at high intensity can produce the same relative gains for frail ninety-year-olds as for thirty-year-olds, Stronger places the science and significance of our muscles in an astonishing new light.

In the era of screens and devices, the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors, and children are no exception. Not only does this phenomenon have consequences for kids’ physical and mental health, it jeopardizes their ability to understand and engage with anything beyond the built environment. Thankfully, with the right mind-set, families can find beauty, meaning, and connection in a life lived outdoors. Here, outdoors expert Steven Rinella shares the parenting wisdom he has garnered as a father whose family has lived amid the biggest cities and wildest corners of America.

The meteoric rise of motorsports phenom Oscar Piastri has been the stuff of legends - so far. Three years and a record-breaking three straight titles across Formula Renault, Formula 3 and Formula 2 set up one of the most anticipated F1 rookie seasons ever when the 21-year-old Melburnian joined the famous McLaren team. Being wooed over from Alpine to replace a struggling Daniel Ricciardo and help turn the team's fortunes around only added to the weight of expectation.

In chapters such as "During Your Swing Is Not the Time to Give Yourself a Lesson" and "How to Enjoy a Bad Round of Golf," the author guides golfers with simple yet powerful techniques to prepare for, execute, and, equally important, respond to the results of any golf shot. The author, Dr. Joseph Parent, is a PGA Tour Instructor who draws on his teaching experience to offer special methods that have led to amazing improvements in the games of professionals and amateurs alike.

In My Life and Rugby he tells his story for the first time, including the full inside story of England’s 2019 World Cup campaign. Since taking over as head coach of England in 2015, Eddie Jones has orchestrated a complete revival of the national team. He has won the Six Nations Championship back-to-back, including England’s first Grand Slam in a generation and their first-ever whitewash of Australia in their own backyard, as well as taking them on their longest-ever winning streak, matching the world record held by the All Blacks.

It started with a cash drop by an English spy in occupied Paris in 1944. Reserved for Resistance groups during the war, the money reached Émilien Amaury, an advertising executive, who was tasked to help France return to a free press once liberated. He soon launched a newspaper empire that—unbeknown to him—would own the rights to run what would become one of the greatest sporting events in history.

Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal school days to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction.

A victim of her mother’s Munchausen by proxy and child abuse survivor, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s unique and controversial case made headlines across the world. Now, she’s finally free to start living her life on her terms—and to tell her own story as only she can.

Ross Edgley famously ran a marathon pulling a 1.4-tonne car and climbed a rope the height of Everest (8,848 m), after living with Yamabushi warrior monks in Japan and partaking in Shamanic pain rituals with fire ants in the Amazon jungle. On his epic 1,780-mile journey around Great Britain, which lasted 157 days, Ross swam through giant jellyfish, arctic storms, ‘haunted’ whirlpools and polluted shipping lanes, going so hard, and so fast, his tongue fell apart.

Throughout history, precious stones have inspired passions and poetry, quests and curses, sacred writings and unsacred actions. Blending adventure travel, geology, exciting new research and her own irresistible charm, Finlay has fashioned a treasure hunt for some of the most valuable, glamorous, and mysterious substances on earth. Jewels is a unique and often exhilarating voyage through history, across cultures, deep into the earth's mantle, and up to the glittering heights of fame, power and wealth.

To uncover the secrets of mental strength and success, Sam Sheridan interviewed dozens of the world's most fascinating and dangerous men.

In Here Comes the Sun, world-renowned author Bill McKibben tells the story of our sudden spike in power from the sun and wind. McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy, which, if it accelerates, gives us a chance not just to limit climate change’s damage, but to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. Getting there means overcoming obstacles like Big Oil, but McKibben sees a chance for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.