Description

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

Publisher Review

Georgia Cloepfil has written a nimble, breathtaking book about the beautiful game, and about her beautiful, brutal life playing it. It reveals so much about the strange, hard path of a young woman pursuing a career as a professional soccer player, but it is far more interesting than an ordinary story of passion, promise, setback, and success. It is, instead, a cleareyed exploration of what passion, promise, setback, and success even mean — Louisa Thomas, sportswriter 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. In her first book, The Striker and the Clock, Cloepfil examines her elusive ambitions and redirected energies — Leanne Shapton, author of Swimming Studies This book introduced me to the poetry of soccer and the humble nomad that is the professional female soccer player. Cloepfil’s accomplishments and sacrifices while on the clock left me inspired; her talent on the page has me in awe — Courtney Maum, author of The Year of the Horses