Former Donegal football boss Jim McGuinness has pipped Kilkenny hurling legend Henry Shefflin to the Bord Gais Energy Sports Book of the Year.
While the newsroom here at KCLR got busy digesting Shefflin’s book following its launch in September of this year, we’ve yet to read any of Until Victory Always from McGuinness, though the secret Santa setup at KCLR might find someone with a copy in a few weeks.
What we can tell you, courtesy of Amazon, is
Jim McGuinness inherited a wounded thing when he took over as manager of the Donegal senior football team in the summer of 2010. When he stepped down just over four years later, the same group of players had won three Ulster championships, the All-Ireland title of 2012 and succeeded in overturning a century-old perception of how Gaelic football should be played.
His departure also marked the end of a personal odyssey, which had begun almost three decades earlier and weathered the aftermath of two family tragedies. Destined to become a classic, Until Victory Always is McGuinness’s unforgettable and highly personal account of his years at the helm of the Donegal team.
Confessional, moving, funny and fiercely honest, it’s at once the epic story of one team’s audacious bid to rewrite its destiny and one man’s moving testament to the power of sport to sustain us in our darkest moments.
The annual Irish Book Awards took place in Dublin last night with Shefflin’s autobiography in the running against Packie Bonner’s The Last Line (autobiography), Until Victory Always, a memoir by Jim McGuinness, The White Heat: My Autobiography by former Kerry footballer Tomás Ó Sé, Peter Stringer’s aptly named autobiography Pulling The Strings along with Sean McGoldricks’s story of Irish olympic boxing, Punching Above Their Weight.
Henry Shefflin: The Autobiography is available in all good book stores in Carlow and Kilkenny.
