I'm a celebrity, get my book this year

Naturally, My Side by David Beckham and Tom Watt dominated paperback sales.

I think what worries me about all this is the inevitable tendency towards conservative, rather copy-cat publishing choices. This was dramatically exemplified by the flood of 'Becks goes to Spain' books.

I had a sense that there must have been a moment when, after his transfer was announced, in offices all across London, editors were saying: "Hey, we could do a book on Beckham's first season at Real - it would be bound to sell - now who could we get to write it . . . "

The sad part was that the best book about an Englishman in Madrid - El Macca by Steve McManaman and Sarah Edworthy (Simon & Schuster,

17.99) - got rather overshadowed in the rush.

Given that the major players in the sports books arena are so focused on star vehicles, it might seem to leave an opportunity for other publishers to produce more thoughtful, quirky, interesting books, even in what's admittedly a tricky sales environment.

Some of them, notably Aurum, Yellow Jersey and Bloomsbury, did so, but overall there seemed to be fewer books of real merit.

There were probably more books than ever submitted for the William Hill Award, but while there were some strong contenders on the final shortlist, even our long list was patchy, and further down the entries standards were decidedly (shall we say) 'uneven'.

Maybe I've been reading sports books for so long that I'm becoming harder to impress, but it seems to me that right now there's too much that's predictable, trivial or just simply poor. Having said all that, what was there that I did like? I felt the William Hill judges got it right, and that Peter Oborne's Basil D'Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy, The Untold Story (Little Brown, 16.99) was a worthy winner, a passionate and meticulous retelling of a very significant, and extremely shameful, episode in cricket history, packed with resonance for the present day.

I also much enjoyed Matthew Pinsent's A Lifetime in a Race (Ebury Press, 18.99), partly because he wrote it himself, partly because he turned out to be such a likeable and interesting guy, and partly because it gently taught me a great deal about rowing.

And while, as a New Zealander, I was right at the centre of the target audience for Huw Richards's superb exploration of what rugby means in Wales and New Zealand, in Dragons and All Blacks (Mainstream, 16.99), I couldn't help hugely admiring it and heartily recommend it.

At the quirkier end, I was charmed by Richard Russell's My Baby Got The Yips (Aurum, 9.99) which is that rare thing, an avowedly amusing look at golf which is genuinely funny.

I was also surprised to discover, via Richard Askwith's Feet in the Clouds (Aurum, 16.99) that I could be interested in fell- running; and I was rivetted by Jon Hotten's Muscle (Yellow Jersey, 10.99) a compelling look inside the crazy world of professional bodybuilding.

My two biggest disappointments, books which I'd looked forward to and expected to enjoy when I first heard about them, were Jack Bremner's Shit Ground No Fans (Bantam Press, 9.99), a failed attempt to capture the acerbic humour of the terraces; and Andrew Baker's Where Am I and Who's Winning? (Yellow Jersey, 10.99), an unbelievably caricatured account of the life of a sports journalist.

But let me end on a more optimistic note. While I'm not all that confident about positive trends for 2005 - I

think it's likely to be pretty much more of the same - I do see a beacon of hope in the US, where sports publishing is alive and well, with writers producing thoughtful books of scope and scale, meaty, thorough and serious.

It's hard to pin down exactly why it should be so different there, but their publishing at the top end is certainly currently better than ours. For me anyway, the pick of 2003 was Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which Norton paperbacked here earlier this year.

My knowledge of what's been produced there this year is far from comprehensive, but my guess is that Michael Leahy's When Nothing Else Matters: Michael Jordan's Last Comeback, which Simon and Schuster are publishing here next February, will take some beating.