Ed Smith

'Sport is a condensed version of life - only it matters less and comes up with better statistics.' In a defining moment of modern sport, football legend Zinédine Zidane executes a vicious head-butt on Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the closing minutes of the World Cup final. During the weeks that follow the whole world asks 'What the hell was he thinking?' Making the reader think completely afresh about the incident, Ed Smith argues that it comes down to this: great athletes, like dictators, have a sense of their own destiny which is entirely alien to mere mortals. And when that destiny goes unfulfilled, frustration burns at fever pitch. In other words, Zidane's head-butt was his angry message to the gods. What Sport Tells Us About Life casts an eye over a spectacular range of topics in sport and culture. In one chapter Smith extols the virtues of amateurism in today's professional world; in another he explains why there'll never be another sportsman as dominant as Don Bradman. He unearths the hidden dimensions of England's 2005 Ashes win, examines the impact of the free market on cricket and football, argues that cheating is not always as clear-cut an issue as it might seem, and wonders whether athletes can learn from beauty queens. Captain of Middlesex, and a brilliant writer,, Smith brings his special kind of insight to these conundrums. The result is a scintillating and entirely original book which shows sport to be a mirror image of the world at large.

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