Vue lecture

We must look beyond the brute numbers to really appreciate Haaland’s legend | Jonathan Liew

4 décembre 2025 à 09:00

Perhaps the data-soaked discourse of modern football actually does this Premier League centurion something of a disservice

Stack them up. Pile them high. Sort them and arrange them, parse them and categorise them, order them to your table like items in a Chinese restaurant. Personal favourites? Give me the No 33 against Arsenal, the one with the flowing hair. I’ll also take a No 81 against Chelsea, when he spots a hapless Robert Sánchez out of goal, and lobs him deliciously from the edge of the area.

Give me a No 98 against Bournemouth, in which he deliberately slants his run around the keeper, slots it in from a tight angle, tries to clamber atop the advertising hoardings in triumph, loses his balance, collapses in peals of giggles. And maybe chuck in a No 53 against Brentford, in which Kristoffer Ajer somehow manages to fall over without being touched, spooked into incoherence by his very presence.

Five of the best sports books of 2025

The Guardian

Par :Jonathan Liew

3 décembre 2025 à 12:00

From the trauma and triumphs of Olympic cyclist Bradley Wiggins to the secret life of a match fixer

The Chain
Bradley Wiggins, (HarperCollins)
The Tour de France winner’s autobiography begins with him sneaking into his walk-in wardrobe and doing a line of coke off his Olympic gold medal: the final emblematic descent from his crowning summer of 2012. And yet for all the personal lows chronicled here – addiction, self-harm, the collapse of his marriage, the haunting memories of his difficult father and of a coach who sexually abused him – this is not your classic misery memoir. Disarmingly honest and roguishly humorous, it is a journey of rediscovery: a man knocked sideways by the toxic winds of sport and celebrity, finally learning to stand straight again.

The Escape: The Tour, the Cyclist and Me
Pippa York and David Walsh (Mudlark)
In a previous life Robert Millar was one of this country’s greatest cyclists: a stern Glaswegian who won the King of the Mountains jersey at the 1984 Tour de France. Now known as Pippa York, she returns to the race in the company of the journalist David Walsh. It’s a freewheeling, fascinating read that defies genre: part travelogue and part memoir, it dances between present and past, sporting observation and self-reflection, drugs that help you cheat and drugs that help you live. And for all the pain and anguish that gets unlocked here, this is a book without a bitter or hateful bone in its body.