Best summer books of 2024: Sport

Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic by David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts (Bloomsbury)

An insightful account of the Australian cricket team’s victory over England in the 1961 Ashes competition. Australia’s captain Richie Benaud, a small-town boy who paid for his team’s drinks on the boat journey across the world, outfoxed his English counterpart, Cambridge graduate Peter May. The authors watched the tour’s opening match as boys.

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My Beautiful Sisters: A Story of Courage, Hope and the Afghan Women’s Football Team by Khalida Popal (John Murray)

Even after Nato drove out the Taliban, many Afghans tried to stop women playing sport. Popal, the founder and first captain of Afghanistan’s female national football team, recounts sexual abuse of players, attempts on her life, and the suicide of a teammate whose family banned her from playing the sport she loved.

World Class: Purpose, Passion, and the Pursuit of Greatness On and Off the Field by Grant Wahl (Ballantine Books)

Wahl was the admired American journalist who died of an aneurysm during a match at the football World Cup in Qatar in 2022, aged 49. This collection of his best work runs from his prescient profile of 17-year-old high-schooler and basketball genius LeBron James to his final piece, excoriating Qatar’s treatment of migrants.

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