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Injury Time is the first novel from the great sportswriter Duncan Hamilton. It is 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.
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.
He lives at the foot of the Yorkshire Dales.
Summary
'One of the best football books I've ever read.' John Motson on Provided You Don't Kiss Me
'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 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?
Injury Time is the first novel from the multiple award-winning sportswriter Duncan Hamilton.
Additional text
An immersive character study of people damaged by sport and its temptations of glory, how some overcome, and how others are crushed by it.
