That the personal is also publishable has long been the unspoken credo of the William Hill prize sport's answer to the Booker a tendency underpinned by its having, unlike the Booker, continuity of judges. From a 130-entry list notable for depth, they followed established tastes in choosing former rugby player Brian Moore's Beware of the Dog (Simon & Schuster, £7.99). The England hooker's second book follows one of the game's better ghosted memoirs (1995) and digs much deeper into an abrasively intelligent, ultra-competitive persona. Moore tells unflinchingly of sexual abuse by a teacher, an alter ego named Gollum and insecurities that made him both an outstanding player and a difficult human being. It is rarely comfortable, but always compelling.
It is, author Tom English acknowledges, greatly to Moore's credit that he helped with The Grudge (Yellow Jersey, £12.99), a vivid recreation of one of his bitterest days England's defeat by Scotland in 1990. English emphasises a political context in which an England team led and epitomised by Will Carling, who emerges more sympathetically than usual, were cast as avatars of Thatcherism. Moore, while relishing his casting as a hate-figure for Scots, sympathised with their political grievances.
If Moore is a worthy beneficiary of William Hill preferences, Jonathan Wilson, the most interesting current football writer, has been their victim. His tactical history, Inverting the Pyramid, is one of the best sports books of the past decade, never mind of the year in which it was shortlisted. This year's The Anatomy of England (Orion, £14.99) isn't quite that good, but by other standards it's exceptional. As ever, Wilson is tactically, historically and culturally literate, with a sharp eye for telling anecdote. His selection of 10 vital England matches is aptly intriguing from 1966 he chooses the World Cup quarter-final against Argentina, not the final and if his optimism about England's chances in South Africa proved unfounded, his misreading was shared by other writers equally immune to nationalist euphoria.
John Nicholson's We Ate All the Pies (Biteback, £9.99), a thematic survey of football in his lifetime by the football365.com columnist, made the William Hill longlist. It is uneven, confirming the column as his true metier, but with much that is perceptive or simply funny. While Wilson analyses and Nicholson rants, fellow north-easterner Harry Pearson deploys a warm, quizzical and astute eye, hinting at how Bill Bryson might have turned out had he come from Teesside instead of Iowa. Sixteen years on from The Far Corner, his brilliant northern football travelogue, Pearson applies the formula to a summer of league cricket. Slipless in Settle (Little, Brown, £12.99) deftly mixes observation, history and affectionate appreciation of the north's people, landscape and idiosyncracies. He is good at jokes, but his humour derives from sympathy and insight.
Elsewhere in cricket there is much insight but understandably little humour in Henry Olonga's Blood, Sweat and Treason (Vision Sports, £18.99), which tells the remarkable story of how Zimbabwe's first black Test cricketer came to join Andy Flower, now England's coach, in a life-jeopardising protest against Robert Mugabe's tyranny. Cricket fans seeking an antidote should try WG Grace Ate My Pedalo (A&C Black, £9.99) by Alan Tyers and Beach, which succeeds at the high-wire challenge of book-length satire, re-imagining a modern cricket magazine in Victorian style.
No sport, perhaps because of its po-faced self-satisfaction, has inspired better humorous writing than golf. The reader, in common possibly with the authors and subject of Scott Murray and Simon Farnaby's The Phantom of the Open (Yellow Jersey, £12.99), remains unsure whether hacker Maurice Flitcroft's various attempts to infiltrate the British Open were wholly serious or an inspired, anarchic debunking of reliably humourless officialdom. Adopting "Arnold Palmtree" as the last of many pseudonyms adds a Leslie Nielsen-like touch to a wonderfully weird (and true) story well told.
If Flitcroft was tragicomic, there is pure tragedy in rugby league player Terry Newton's Coming Clean (Vertical, £8.99), whose upbeat conclusion to a tell-it-like-it-is account of ferocious but troubled northern masculinity, well co-written by Phil Wilkinson, gave way to despair and suicide in September. Similar poignancy attends cyclist Laurent Fignon's We Were Young and Carefree (Yellow Jersey, £12.99). Fignon, who died in August, tells of almost inconceivable early success, the frustrations of subsequent decline, and exasperation at being known for the Tour de France that he lost by eight seconds rather than for the two he won. William Fotheringham's translation is, like Fignon himself, elegant and vivid.
Cycling also offers Bradley Wiggins's On Tour (Orion, £14.99). This probably is not the book his publishers wanted, since Wiggins was among the favourites for the 2010 Tour de France yet finished 24th, but it is almost certainly a better one chronicling disappointment, pain and failure. Beautifully supported by Scott Mitchell's photography, its brevity contains wit, intelligence, self-awareness and brilliant appreciations of fellow riders, a credit to Wiggins and co-writer Brendan Gallagher.
Like cycling, boxing has the literary advantages of taking humanity to its limits. Errol Christie's No Place to Hide (Aurum, £16.99) is a good account of a career's rise and fall given true distinction by its grim recounting of the brutality and racism he encountered growing up in Coventry. Christie was a fine boxer, but even he could only dream of the staggering achievements of Manny Pacquaio, the most compelling ring presence since Muhammad Ali. Gary Andrew Poole's PacMan (Da Capo, £10.99) has something of both the breathless urgency of Pacquiao in the ring and the extraordinary chaos that accompanies him outside.
Huw Richards is cricket and rugby correspondent of the International Herald Tribune. To order any of these books call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846.
