The Striker and the Clock

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.

'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