The Striker and the Clock by Georgia Cloepfil

An exhilarating and searing memoir about life as a professional female footballer - and a beautiful examination of the joy and pain of serious athletics.

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 doctor’s 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.

Hardback
Publication: 18 July 2024, Bloomsbury
ISBN: 9781529097849
Extent: 208 pages