The Club - Softcover

O'Connor, Christy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014139966X ISBN 13: 9780141399669

Publisher: Penguin, 2011

Synopsis

This chronicle of a year in the life of St Joseph's Doora-Barefield GAA club in Co. Clare - which won the William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year award for 2010 - breaks new ground in Irish sportswriting. Christy O'Connor, a national GAA correspondent who has also been the St Joseph's senior team goalkeeper for 20 years, tells this story with unflinching honesty: a fly-on-the-wall tale of the effort, agony and struggles that define the journey undertaken every season by every club side. This is grassroots GAA at its purest and rawest, a great story brilliantly told. This paperback book has 232 pages and measures: 19.7 x 13 x 1.5cm

About this title

Review:

To understand Ireland, you have to understand the GAA. To understand the GAA, you have to read this book. A masterpiece. (Tom Humphries)

An extraordinary saga - unflinching in its honesty. This book is to hurling what Eamon Dunphy's seminal Only a Game? was to soccer writing

(Richard Fitzpatrick Irish Examiner)

This is one of the best sports that has been written in Ireland. You'll cry a lot, if you have a soul. And if you love sport, you'll love this book.

(Ger Gilroy)

Deserves its place among the most courageous Irish sports books ever conceived, and one of the finest ever written

(Michael Foley Sunday Times)

From the Back Cover:

The hurlers of St Joseph's Doora-Barefield began the 2009 season shadowed by past glories and rocked by a series of tragedies. The Club - winner of the 2010 William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year - is the story of that season and of that club, a book that gets to the heart of the GAA like no other.

'To understand Ireland, you have to understand the GAA. To understand the GAA, you have to read this book. A masterpiece' Tom Humphries

'An extraordinary saga - unflinching in its honesty. This book is to hurling what Eamon Dunphy's seminal Only a Game? was to soccer writing' Richard Fitzpatrick, Irish Examiner

'Here's a safe prediction: The Club will still be as fresh and relevant in 10, 20, even 50 years' time as it is today' Enda McEvoy, Sunday Tribune

'This is a book to grace any bookshelf, honest and dignified to the last' Keith Duggan, Irish Times

'This is one of the best sports that has been written in Ireland. You'll cry a lot, if you have a soul. And if you love sport, you'll love this book.' Ger Gilroy

'O'Connor exposes the desperate, hurried exchanges in a championship dressing-room at half-time as no one has ever really done before ... O'Connor's achievement here is to give particular material universal significance' Michael Moynihan, Irish Examiner

'It is so open and searingly honest that, at times, the reader feels like a voyeur ... That lends the story its edge and its raw, feral power' John O'Brien, Sunday Independent

'Deserves its place among the most courageous Irish sports books ever conceived, and one of the finest ever written' Michael Foley, Sunday Times

'It is, simply, a flawless masterpiece' Gaelic Life

'A searingly honest book that opens the door into the GAA in a way that has not been done before' Liam Kelly, Irish Independent

'The most distinctive GAA book of the year ... and probably the best ... The appeal of the book is that everyone in the GAA will be able to see their own club in it' Kieran Shannon, Sunday Tribune

Christy O'Connor has covered GAA nationally for fourteen years and is the author of the acclaimed Last Man Standing: Hurlling Goalkeepers.

Half the royalties from the sale of this book will go to the Jack and Jill Foundation and to Croí.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 014139966X
• ISBN 13: 9780141399669
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256