The Striker and the Clock

The Striker and the Clock is a memoir by Georgia Cloepfil about her life as a professional female footballer, exploring the joy and pain of serious athletics. It is a profound meditation on what it is to have a body and the compulsion to push it to do the near impossible.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 18 July 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

An exhilarating and searing memoir about life as a professional female footballer - and a beautiful examination of the joy and pain of serious athletics - 'Will appeal to readers ready and willing to embrace the deep affinities among the craft and discipline of sport (TLS)' In 'The Striker and the Clock', Georgia Cloepfil tells the story of her life in football: the triumph, the exhilaration, the deep bonds between teammates, and also the years of self-denial, exile, and dedication, in which players try in vain to outpace a clock that ticks down toward an indeterminate ending. Threading between floodlit pitches, sparse dorm rooms, and doctors' offices, Cloepfil outlines an obsessive pursuit: one that sees her begin each day by touching the ball a thousand times, running sprints alone on empty fields, and practicing near-constant visualization and revisualization of triumph and despair. What emerges is a profound meditation on what it is to have a body, and what it is to have the compulsion to push it to do the near impossible; and a love letter to the motivations, joys, pains, and desires of a beautiful game. Georgia Cloepfil has written a nimble, breathtaking book about the beautiful game, and about her beautiful, brutal life playing it (Louisa Thomas, sports writer for the New Yorker) With the deft and determined movements of a seasoned player, Georgia Cloepfil writes about what it means to endure and what it means to leave a sport behind (Leanne Shapton)

Weight: 316g
Dimension: 223 x 142 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781526668516
Edition number: Unabridged ed