Vendor
	Fletcher Agency Melissa Chinchillo
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items Sports & Active outdoor recreation

INJURY TIME

Duncan Hamilton

Multiple award-winning sportswriter Duncan Hamilton’s first novel—about accepting the past and living a life in the present, hope and disappointment, success and failure— and how close all of those things are in life and in the glory game.

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed by that attitude. I can assure you it's much more important than that.” —Bill Shankly

What Shankly said isn't even half-true. In fact, it's bollocks. Football isn't the be-all and end-all of everything. If nothing else, I know that much. As a player, Thom Callaghan was defined by the winning goal he scored in an FA Cup final. The goal wasn't the blessing he imagined it would be. His whole career was defined by that brief moment of glory.

With his playing days over, Callaghan, still a local hero, is tempted back to his old club as caretaker manager. His task is to rescue it from relegation. He's got the job solely on the recommendation of his former boss and mentor Frank Mallory, now desperately ill and responsible for the team's precipitous decline.

Callaghan is pitched into the Premier League during the last months of the 1996-1997 season, where - among reputations more gilded than his own - he finds himself pitted against the likes of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United, chasing their fourth title in five years, and also one of the newest recruits to the English game, Arsene Wenger.

Can Callaghan save his club from what seems the inevitability of the drop? Does Mallory - eccentric, inspirational and manipulative - even want him to succeed? What if the prize of a personal triumph isn't worth it in the end?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Duncan Hamilton has won three William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prizes. He has been nominated on a further four occasions. He has also claimed two British Sports Book Awards and is the first writer to have won the Wisden Cricket Book of the Year on three occasions. His biography of the Chariots of Fire runner Eric Liddell, For the Glory, was a New York Times bestseller. He most recently collaborated with Jonny Bairstow on the cricketer's autobiography, A Clear Blue Sky.

Available products
Book Published 2021-07-08 by riverrun/Quercus

Comments

It is a truism that the best sports novels are not really about sport. Injury Time is about many things aside from football, not least relationships between father figures and their sons, and what happens to people when their primary focus in life is removed. But it should be noted that there is an awful lot of football here too, right down to teams preferring to operate with “4–4–2 or 3–4–3” so as to best capitalise on their “speed on the break” and so on.
There are few authors better qualified than Duncan Hamilton to handle such detail. This is his debut novel, but he has won the William Hill sports book of the year award three times and picked up multiple other prizes. His breakthrough was a memoir of 20 years of almost daily contact with Brian Clough, including ghosting the football manager’s newspaper columns, when Hamilton was a reporter in Nottingham during Clough’s 70s and 80s glory years.
He has returned to the figure of Clough here, cursorily tweaked as Scottish rather than a Teessider, in the form of charismatic and overbearing manager Frank Mallory. Mallory’s surrogate son is young Thom Callaghan (whose own father, to add to the generational baggage, had delivered the career-ending tackle that prematurely concluded Mallory’s time as a player). Callaghan is a good if not spectacular footballer, but nevertheless scores the goal that wins the FA Cup for Frank before going on to become a manager himself, eventually taking Frank’s job when the senior man’s powers begin to dramatically wane.
The novel could undoubtedly do with a harder highlights edit of overlong match accounts, but Injury Time presents a convincing behind the scenes re-enactment of English football in the latter decades of the 20th century. Stars and lesser lights, from Beckham to Bobby Stokes, Cruyff to Kerry Dixon, fluidly interact with Hamilton’s almost exclusively male cast of fathers, mentors, heroes, rivals, supplicants, enablers and heirs. The portrait of betrayal, resentment, manipulation and – sort of – love that emerges has a sharp veracity, as do the consequences of mental and physical damage incurred. Thom’s career arc may be a bit Boy’s Own-ish, but football, and writing about football, is full of cliches that also contain truths. Early on we encounter Bill Shankly’s old adage about the sport not being a matter of life and death – “it’s more important than that”. Hamilton has a perceptively humane understanding of men for whom football was never just a game.

FOR THE GLORY
Korean / The Blessed People Publishing Co.
Italian / 66th And 2nd

IMMORTAL:
Italian / 66th And 2nd
Turkish / Inkilap Publishing

'What I enjoy most about this beautifully written and tender account of the relationship between a nervous young provincial reporter and a football genius is the sense of genuine proximity to its subject, so that Clough's obvious flaws seem forgivable and even beguiling, rather than cruel and unbearable. Wonderful book' - Russel Brand, Guardian on Provided You Don't Kiss Me

'One of the best football books I've ever read.' - John Motson on Provided You Don't Kiss Me

'Hamilton...expresses the passion that millions like him, in pursuit of happiness and belonging, feel for the beautiful game. Simply magnificent' - Mail on Sunday

'A marriage of prose and detail so fine and fastidious that it takes the breath away' - Independent

'Justifiably prize-winning' - Mail on Sunday