Six of the best: The best sports books of the year

The dining-room of the Mansour Eddahbi Hotel in Marrakech was quiet on Wednesday lunchtime, so there weren't many people around to see a middle-aged Englishman sitting alone and wiping tears from his cheek. I am not ashamed to admit that this lachrymose fellow was me, and that the tears were provoked by page 98 of Basil D'Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy – The Untold Story, by Peter Oborne. I had picked up the book at Heathrow to keep me company on a brief writing assignment in Morocco.

I knew it would be good – it was William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2003 – but not how good. Oborne presents, almost in thriller form, the story of how the so-called Cape-coloured D'Oliveira overcame the unspeakable cruelties of apartheid, and how the British establishment effectively collaborated with Balthazar Johannes Vorster's repugnant government to keep him out of England's 1968 tour of South Africa.

It is also, in parts, immensely poignant, not least the account on page 98 of D'Oliveira and his wife learning, in 1966, that he was about to become an England player.

On Monday, at Waterstone's in Piccadilly, a book as good as Oborne's, perhaps even better, will be chosen as this year's William Hill Sports Book of the Year. The shortlist is as formidable as ever and illustrates, in the award's 20th year, that the literature of sport has become a hugely respectable genre in its own right.

It was not always thus, and indeed the claim is undermined by the churning out of empty autobiographies following notable British sporting success or even abject under-achievement. The 2006 World Cup was a dispiriting case in point, and while the troubled footballer Joey Barton has done very little to earn public applause, he should have been cheered from the rooftop of every discerning sports enthusiast when, on being called into the England squad last year, he berated some of his new team-mates for cashing in on failure. "We got beat in the quarter-finals. I played like shit. Here's my book." There will always be such cashing-in, and nobody ever overestimated the weakness of the book-buying public for a famous face on a nice glossy jacket, but the William Hill award, and several others like it, testify to sport's increasing capacity to inspire really splendid literature.

Of course, it is nothing new for sport to play as well on the page as it does in the field, and great writers from PG Wodehouse to Norman Mailer have recognised as much, but there has never been as much competition in sporting literature, or as much kudos. So, hats off to William Hill. I have read only one of the books on this year's shortlist – Marcus Trescothick's searingly candid autobiography Coming Back To Me – but if it gets beaten on Monday, it will be by a very fine book indeed.

The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948

By Janie Hampton, Yellow Jersey Press, £12.99

Above the stadium the huge, white Olympic flag was hauled up the masthead and broke open on the breeze... The schoolboy John Glenister was watching from his post immediately below the royal box. "Immediately behind me was a long line of wicker baskets, each one attended by a soldier... The next moment I was engulfed in pigeons, all flapping past me. They were conveying the message to the whole world that the Games were open." The 350 baskets had arrived in London that morning by train from pigeon racing clubs all over Britain, as well as six European countries. The British team had been warned to keep their berets on. The US team in their white felt hats were also prepared, but Angus Carmichael noticed one American holding his hat in his hand. "The crown was stuffed with dollar bills. I asked him why he needed so much money, and he told me that the American team were running a sweepstake. The winner would be the first hat to be blessed by one of the pigeons."

Bad Blood: The Secret Life of the Tour de France

By Jeremy Whittle, Atlantic, £18.99

As 2003 ended, David [Millar] appeared to have it all. Paul Smith, thinking of using him as a model. Cofidis were dangling what was in essence, with bonuses, a million-euro contract. He was a world champion who talked of the importance of respect from his peers and saw himself as one of those bosses in the peloton. David's life had become a high octane, high-wire act, fuelled by his charm, energy and opportunism.

But he was living on borrowed time. In June 2004, Millar lost everything. He had never failed a drugs test, but, detained and questioned by the French police and an investigating judge, he admitted that at certain key periods in his career he had doped himself with EPO. The police followed the path to his door opened by the testimonies of Philippe Gaumont, his former Cofidis team-mate... Gaumont's litany of his own chaos, self-abuse and addictive behaviour was unflinching. He was equally unsparing of others...

When the Cofidis scandal broke in the spring of 2004, Gaumont was the principal whistle-blower, pouring out his trade secrets to investigating judge, Richard Pallain. In March that year as he raced for Cofidis in Paris-Nice, Millar was paranoid, melancholic, defensive. I spoke to him in the start village at Digne-les-Bains. He was dressed up and ready to race, but I could tell that his heart was no longer in it, as if he knew what was coming.

Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

By John Carlin, Atlantic, £18.99

When they caught sight of him, the crowd seemed to go dead still. "It was as if they could not believe what their eyes were seeing," said [Lois] Luyt. Then a chant began, low at first, but rising quickly in volume and intensity.

Morné du Plessis caught it as he emerged out of the dressing room and down the players' tunnel onto the field. "I walked out into this bright, harsh winter sunlight and at first I could not make out what was going on, what the people were chanting, why there was so much excitement before the players had even gone out onto the field. Then I made out the words. This crowd of white people, of Afrikaners, as one man, as one nation, they were chanting: 'Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!' Over and over, 'Nel-son! Nel-son!' and, well, it was just..."

The big rugby man's eyes filled with tears as he struggled to find the words to fit the moment. "I don't think," he continued, "I don't think I'll ever experience a moment like that again. It was a moment of magic, a moment of wonder. It was the moment I realized that there really was a chance this country could work."

Coming Back to Me: The Autobiography

By Marcus Trescothick, HarperSport, £18.99

By the time we checked in for the flight at around 7.30pm, I was clinging on and clinging to the idea that I might be able to get on the plane and once aboard, maybe the feelings would go... I ordered a bacon and egg sandwich and as I finished the last bite, time stopped for a millisecond. In that blink of the mind I was cooked and I knew it. Sensing I could go at any second, I was desperate to ... get away from the other two lads because I never liked breaking down in front of other people... I rang Sarge, and asked him to come and meet me straight away, although I didn't tell him why..." In between the sobs and tears I told him: "Andy, I'd love to be able to do it but I'm not sure I can. I don't want to get over to Dubai and f**k it up and have to come home again.

That is the last thing I want to do. I'd rather walk away from it now than go over there, then have to get the flight home again, because I've done that twice before and it causes me so much pain..." It's hard to say how long it took for the symptoms of my illness to subside enough to allow me some clear air to think about something, anything, other than how awful I was feeling. But when the moment came, so did certain truths and the most hurtful one was this: I could never again contemplate the possibility of playing cricket for my country, the love of my professional life.

Bamboo Goalposts: One Man's Quest to Teach China to Love Football

By Rowan Simons, Macmillan, £14.99

One of the great joys of living in China is being surrounded by a culture spanning five millennia, and hidden within this incredible legacy are several ancient football paintings and documents that still survive today. They reveal fascinating details about how football was used to overcome the human urge to cheat, even emerging as a popular sport in civil society. Amazingly for any era in history, it was a game played by both men and women of all ages. One story tells of a young girl who single-handedly defeated a team of soldiers, while prized pottery often featured images of children playing with their footballs.

One particular form of football became popular during the Han Dynasty (206BC to AD220). While Jesus was struggling to find a 12th man he could trust, the Han emperors loved nothing more than to visit the local stadium to watch a game of cuju or "kick ball"...

One of the earliest images of a football player is found on a monument at the bottom of the holy Song Shan (Song Mountain) in Henan province. The bottom of Song Shan is better known as the site of Shaolin Temple...

Inscribed nearly 2,000 years ago, it shows two spectators. They are watching an unnamed player in a long silk gown complete a move described by Fifa's historian as "firing a rasping left-footed shot on the turn". One-nil.

Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics

By Jonathan Wilson, Orion Books, £18.99

The fishing fleet lies dark against the sun-washed sea. Along the Tyrrhenian waterfront, a stressed football manager, unable to sleep, takes an early morning walk. Oblivious to the shrieking of the gulls and the haggling of the dockside mongers, he strides on, asking himself again and again how he can get the best out of his side, ponders how he can strengthen a defence that, for all his best efforts, remains damagingly porous. As he paces the harbour, churning the problem over and over in his head, a boat catches his eye. The fishermen haul in one net, swollen with fish, and then behind it, another: the reserve net. This is his eureka moment.

Some fish inevitably slip the first net, but they are caught by the second; he realises that what his side needs is a reserve defender operating behind the main defence to catch those forwards who slip through. That manager was Gipo Viani, his team was Salernitana, and his invention was "catenaccio"... Whether it was inspired by a dawn walk by the sea or not, it seems that Viani, recognising the limited resources at his disposal, decided that the most fruitful policy was to try to stop the opposition playing – to exercise the "right of the weak". One of the notional half-backs, Alberto Piccinini, who went on to win two "scudetti" with Juventus, dropped in to mark the opposing centre-forward, with the central of the three defenders in the W-M [Herbert Chapman's (left) "third-back" tactic], which had come by then to supplant [Vittorio] Pozzo's "metodo" as the default formation in Italy, falling back as the sweeper. Viani then had his team sit deep, drawing out the opposition, leading them to commit extra men to the attack and so rendering them vulnerable to the counter.