What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman’s Average, Zidane’s Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons
By Ed Smith
Viking Penguin £15.99, 208 pages
Athletes who can write tend to be cricketers. Smith, a brilliant batsman whose England career was brutally truncated by bad luck, outdoes his peers: he can write about all sports – not just cricket – and draw from them lessons on history, psychology and statistics. He’s such an elegant writer that this sometimes reads like a book of fables.

Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics
By Jonathan Wilson
Orion £18.99, 384 pages
British football writers traditionally ignore tactics. Only Brian Glanville gave them the reverence they deserve. But now Wilson, an FT journalist, has crossed the planet from Minsk to Buenos Aires to show how the game has evolved and how strikers may be going extinct.