Best sports books of 2023: Riveting Rocket, beautiful Brady, the King, and a lost classic

10 reads from 2023: Richard Fitzpatrick selects the sports books that grabbed him this year.

The Grass Ceiling: On Being a Woman in Sport by Eimear Ryan (Sandycove/Penguin, €17)

Unbreakable by Ronnie O’Sullivan with Tom Fordyce (Seven Dials, €24) 

There is no game like professional snooker. Footballers in the English Premier League get away with 90 minutes training a day. Snooker players who want to stay at elite level must grind out five, six hours practice a day. If you knock a ball into the net in tennis, you get another shot at redemption a few seconds later. Doesn’t work that way in snooker. In golf, your rival can’t stick your ball behind a tree, just to make you suffer. Snooker, as Ronnie O’Sullivan writes in his memoir, “is all about ruining your opponent’s life”.