A Close Finish PDF Download

Author: AUSTIN AGUOCHA
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 171613868X
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
A brilliant attempt at exposing the thrills, expectations and perils of football prediction.A fun read.

Author: Ben Lindbergh
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541698959
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Move over, Moneyball -- this New York Times bestseller examines major league baseball's next cutting-edge revolution: the high-tech quest to build better players. As bestselling authors Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik reveal in The MVP Machine, the Moneyball era is over. Fifteen years after Michael Lewis brought the Oakland Athletics' groundbreaking team-building strategies to light, every front office takes a data-driven approach to evaluating players, and the league's smarter teams no longer have a huge advantage in valuing past performance. Lindbergh and Sawchik's behind-the-scenes reporting reveals: How undersized afterthoughts José Altuve and Mookie Betts became big sluggers and MVPs How polarizing pitcher Trevor Bauer made himself a Cy Young contender How new analytical tools have overturned traditional pitching and hitting techniques How a wave of young talent is making MLB both better than ever and arguably worse to watch Instead of out-drafting, out-signing, and out-trading their rivals, baseball's best minds have turned to out-developing opponents, gaining greater edges than ever by perfecting prospects and eking extra runs out of older athletes who were once written off. Lindbergh and Sawchik take us inside the transformation of former fringe hitters into home-run kings, show how washed-up pitchers have emerged as aces, and document how coaching and scouting are being turned upside down. The MVP Machine charts the future of a sport and offers a lesson that goes beyond baseball: Success stems not from focusing on finished products, but from making the most of untapped potential.

Author: Chuck Culpepper
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767928083
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Chuck Culpepper was a veteran sports journalist edging toward burnout . . . then he went to London and discovered the high-octane, fanatical (and bloody confusing!) world of English soccer. After covering the American sports scene for fifteen years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world—the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.” Writing in the vein of perennial bestsellers such as Fever Pitch and Among the Thugs, Chuck Culpepper brings penetrating insight to the vibrant landscape of English soccer—visiting such storied franchises as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool . . . and an equally celebrated assortment of pubs. Bloody Confused! will put a smile on the face of any sports fan who has ever questioned what makes us love sports in the first place.

Author: Kausik Bandyopadhyay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040222943
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 579

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Book Description
This book explores the meanings, significances, and impacts of the complex identities that soccer fans, especially those of men's soccer, represent worldwide. The chapters in this volume construct and reconstruct fandom in terms of diverse fan affiliations from local to global level, and from national to transnational spaces. Soccer or (association) football is a game where fans come alive with one goal. It is soccer’s fanbase that has made it the most popular mass spectator sport in the world. Since the sport’s growth and its codification in the late nineteenth century, soccer and its followers became markers of varied identities. This volume is an attempt to understand the soccer fan’s tryst with such identities, mostly at the level of professional men’s football in different parts of the world. Fans create, represent, break, recreate, transcend, complicate and confuse diverse identities in their attachments with and loyalties to particular clubs, nations, continents, spaces, communities, races, ethnicities, and players. These identities are given shape through the display and observance of diverse forms of fandom and fan subcultures. Against this wider backdrop, the book brings out the commonalities, conflicts and tensions within these fan identities. Why Fans Matter? Fans and Identities in the Soccer World will be a fascinating read for anybody with an interest in sport and its intersection with disciplines such as sociology, political science, history, media studies, or cultural studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

Author: Chuck Culpepper
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767930193
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Chuck Culpepper was a veteran sports journalist edging toward burnout . . . then he went to London and discovered the high-octane, fanatical (and bloody confusing!) world of English soccer. After covering the American sports scene for fifteen years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world—the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.” Writing in the vein of perennial bestsellers such as Fever Pitch and Among the Thugs, Chuck Culpepper brings penetrating insight to the vibrant landscape of English soccer—visiting such storied franchises as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool . . . and an equally celebrated assortment of pubs. Bloody Confused! will put a smile on the face of any sports fan who has ever questioned what makes us love sports in the first place.

Author: Joe Jennings
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 140926940X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
"Ever the Optimist" is a heart warming tale of Joe Jennings' love affair with his football club, which shows no sign of wilting despite the heartaches they have presented him over the years.The book is an epic adventure, a plethora of events that have been cherry picked to signify the resurrection of one of English football's great bastions; which after years of decline is finally emerging from the depths to cement itself back among the elite. They are by no means there, but the author has seen enough to suggest that the tide is turning, and as he steers you through the waters of hope, with the enthusiasm and optimism that underlines his every sentence, it starts to rub off on you and you are willing them to succeed as much as he. It is feeling that you rarely get from a football book and it is arguably the first that has been able to capture the spirit and emotion that has been missing from books of this genre since Nick Hornby's 'Fever Pitch'.

Author: Per Mertesacker
Publisher: deCoubertin Books
ISBN: 1909245933
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
At Arsenal, the club where he won the FA Cup three times, Per Mertesacker was affectionately called the 'Big Friendly German.' Standing at 6ft 6in, he was the defender who took fitness so seriously that he invested ten per-cent of his annual salary on personal therapists. His endurance would help him in a decade- long career with the German national team which culminated in him lifting the World Cup in 2014. In his autobiography, Mertesacker reveals the story of that summer in Brazil, explaining the tactical tricks of Jogi Low as well as the motivational arts of Arsene Wenger. He asks himself to what extent talent plays a role in football, having been a youth who was told he had too little of it until he was promoted by Ralf Rangnick at Hannover 96. Now the academy manager at Arsenal, Mertesacker details what it really takes to become a success in the game he started playing when he was just four years old.

Author: Martyn Smith
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446415899
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The Premiership in Focus celebrates 15 years that have changed the face of football. When Football Focus began life on BBC1 in 1968 as Football Preview, football in England was about old wooden terraces, grounds that were ankle deep in mud or covered in snow and a Bovril at half time. In 1992 came the Premier League and the sport changed forever. The Premier League was established as one of the most exciting, cosmopolitan and widely watched national sporting leagues in the world and fans are now able to watch hundreds of Premiership matches live as football has seemingly taken over much of national life. Why has this happened? How has it affected the clubs, fans, players and managers? How long can it be sustained? This book aims to examine these questions as well as celebrate 15 amazing years of football. It will look back at the great moments, outstanding matches, stunning goals, incredible saves, controversial decisions and the sheer excitement that has been the Premiership.

Author: Luke Dempsey
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393349306
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Everything any fan needs to know. Club Soccer 101 is the essential guide to 101 of the most storied soccer clubs in the world. The book covers the history of European powerhouses like Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Manchester United, Paris Saint-Germain, and Real Madrid; historic South American clubs like Boca Juniors, Corinthians, Penarol, and Santos; and rising clubs from Africa, Asia, and America, including such leading MLS clubs as LA Galaxy, New York Red Bulls, and Seattle Sounders. Writing with the passion and panache of a deeply knowledgeable and opinionated fan, Luke Dempsey explains what makes each club distinctive: their origins, fans, and style of play; their greatest (and most heartbreaking) seasons and historic victories and defeats; and their most famous players—from Pelé, Eusébio, and Maradona to Lionel Messi, Wayne Rooney, and Ronaldo. With club soccer exploding in popularity, Club Soccer 101 provides everything any fan needs to know.

Author: Mark Worrall
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 0955745985
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
£80 million in debt and with financial meltdown a matter of weeks away, in July 2003 Chelsea Football Club were saved from almost certain penury by Roman Abramovich, a reclusive young billionaire that few people outside his native Russia had heard of. Making History, Not Reliving It recounts the first decade of Roman’s rule in London mirrored against a backdrop of an ever-changing, social-media-driven, angst and envy-ridden world where the revolving door of change seems to spin as fast as that of the manager’s at Stamford Bridge. Granular season-by-season detail of exactly how Chelsea amassed three league titles, four FA Cups, two League Cups, a Champions League and a Europa League in ten eventful years is entertainingly supplemented with news and entertainment bulletins and rounded off with enlightening and diverse points of view provided by a broad cross section of supporters unified by their blissful enjoyment of the desperate jealousy of rival fans now only able to relive the history that their own precious club’s once made.