‘The State is divided. It’s not life or death, it’s more important.’So says a poster on Dennis Cometti’s wall – and that’s what David Whish-Wilson and Sean Gorman found when they interviewed 40 fans of the West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers.The book features James Baker, Julie Bishop, Fedele Camarda, Maria Camporeale, Kevin Croon, Jesse Dart, Ron Elliott, Les Everett, Alison Fan, Glenis Freemantle, Maria Giglia, Mark Greenwood, Gaby Haddow, Julie Hoffman, Adrian Hoffman, Greig Johnston, Justin Langer, Deanne Lewis, Dennis Lillee, Lesley the Voodoo Lady, Luc Longley, Alsy Macdonald, Carla Mackesey, Ross McLean, Shaun McManus, Clive Mercer, Ian MacRae, Kia Mippy, Peter Mudie, Jeff Newman, Gillian O’Shaughnessy, Melissa Parke, Parsi, Janet Peters, John Prior, Matt Quinn aka Mr Q, Kim Scott, Glen Stasiuk, Bill Sutherland, Bevan Taylor, David Wirrpanda.

'What a strike from Mike Sheron - what a thronker!' screamed Dan Walker, now the host of Football Focus. And with that description of the kind of ferociously struck shot that would knock over a pig if it caught it full in the face, the cult of the Thronker - and eventually this book - was born. Glorifying everything that is weird and wonderful about the beautiful game, Dan Walker's Football Thronkersauruscontains hilarious stories and facts that will answer almost any football question you could possibly think of, from which outfield player went 20 years without scoring a goal, to which player had to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factorybefore every game? The Thronkersaurushas these, and plenty more, covered. Laced with a load of Dan's daft stories from inside the world of broadcasting and his football-crazy childhood, the Thronkersaurusis the ultimate celebration of football, its ridiculous characters and its incredible history.

New Orleans has long been a city fixated on its own history and culture. Founded in 1718 by the French, transferred to the Spanish in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and sold to the United States in 1803, the city’s culture, law, architecture, food, music, and language share the influence of all three countries. This cultural mélange also manifests in the city’s approach to sport, where each game is steeped in the city’s history. Tracing that history from the early nineteenth century to the present, while also surveying the state of the city’s sports historiography, New Orleans Sports places sport in the context of race relations, politics, and civic and business development to expand that historiography—currently dominated by a text that stops at 1900—into the twentieth century, offering a modern examination of sports in the city.

In 1991, the collapse of the USSR seemed to signal the death of the Russian football industry, as the money, the players and the fans left. But now the oligarchs who profited from the post-Soviet turmoil are supporting the nation's football clubs and their dreams of glory, resulting in unprecedented success. Along this journey into the heart of Russian football, Marc Bennetts meets the managers, oligarchs, players, pundits and fans that define the Russian Premier league, now the fastest-growing and most intriguing football league in the world. From Andrei Arshavin and the national team's adventures at Euro 2008 to the symbolism of a club from war-torn Chechnya lifting the Russian FA Cup, Football Dynamo uncovers shocking revelations about corruption, hooliganism and racism, but also the true beauty of the game and the country.

TAKE THIS SUPER BOWL AND SHOVE IT. At least that's what Oakland Raiders' fan Craig Parker thinks. A card-carrying member of Raider Nation, Parker adds a new chapter to the written history of the Silver and Black. Writing from the too often dismissed perspective of the dedicated fan, Parker gives voice to the hopes, fears, prejudices, and fantasies of not only the usual suspects in the Black Hole, but also of the ordinary folks at home on the couch. Against the backdrop of the nearly triumphant 2002 season, Parker gloats over victories, agonizes over defeats, and exchanges insults with opposing fans (The Denver Donkies?). He recounts in detail the greatest wins in Raider history, and provides imaginative but sincere excuses for the biggest losses (The "Immaculate Deception"). Ever the paranoiac, he explains Raider Mystique and the rule changes adopted by the NFL to counter it. Boston Heraldsportswriter George Kimball states: "Parker, in any case, writes very well, has a sharp eye for detail, and remembers more than just about any sportswriter I could name." From Parker's viewpoint, Raiders football is not just a game; it's a way of life. Family loyalty is the cardinal virtue: respect Al Davis, love all current Raiders, and honor the memory of the past. Parker maintains an edgy but positive attitude throughout the book. He extols the Raiders' dedication to excellence, their emphasis on teamwork, and their amazing ability to overcome adversity brought on (mostly) by forces outside the organization. In Parker's world, even in defeat, the Raiders honor the game of football and their dedicated followers. This book is a must read for Raider fans, as well as other football fans seeking comfort in numbers. It justifies being a fan. It reminds us of our darkest thoughts, our wildest fantasies. It brings back the glorious past, and it raises our hopes for the future.

As the most popular mass spectator sport across the world, soccer generates key moments of significance on and off the field, encapsulated in events that create metaphors and memories, with wider social, cultural, psychological, political, commercial and aesthetic implications. Since its inception as a modern game, the history of soccer has been replete with events that have changed the organization, meanings and impact of the sport. The passage from the club to the nation or from the local to the global often opens up transnational spaces that provide a context for studying the events that have ‘defined’ the sport and its followers. Such defining events can include sporting performances, decisions taken by various stakeholders of the game, accidents and violence among players and fans, and invention of supporter cultures, among other things. The present volume attempts to document, identify and analyse some of the defining events in the history of soccer from interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives. It revisits the discourses of signification and memorialization of such events that have influenced society, culture, politics, religion, and commerce. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Soccer & Society.

Gridiron football is the king of sports – it's the biggest game in the strongest and richest country in the world. In The King of Sports, Easterbrook tells the full story of how football became so deeply ingrained in American culture. Both good and bad, he examines its impact on American society. The King of Sports explores these and many other topics: * The real harm done by concussions (it's not to NFL players). * The real way in which college football players are exploited (it's not by not being paid). * The way football helps American colleges (it's not bowl revenue) and American cities (it's not Super Bowl wins). * What happens to players who are used up and thrown away (it's not pretty). * The hidden scandal of the NFL (it's worse than you think). Using his year-long exclusive insider access to the Virginia Tech football program, where Frank Beamer has compiled the most victories of any active NFL or major-college head coach while also graduating players, Easterbrook shows how one big university "does football right." Then he reports on what's wrong with football at the youth, high school, college and professional levels. Easterbrook holds up examples of coaches and programs who put the athletes first and still win; he presents solutions to these issues and many more, showing a clear path forward for the sport as a whole.

Sporting Blackness examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Sheppard analyzes not only “skin in the game,” or how racial representation shapes the genre’s imagery, but also “skin in the genre,” or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre’s modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain “critical muscle memories”: embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.