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 team mates, and also the years of self-denial, exile and obsessive dedication, in which players try to outpace the clock that ticks down to that one injury that will end it all.

Threading between floodlit pitches, sparse dorm rooms, and doctor's offices, Cloepfil outlines an obsessive pursuit of perfection: one that sees her begin each day by touching the ball a thousand times; running over six miles in practices with a meter strapped to her body; and 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 a compulsion to push it to do the near impossible; and a love letter to the motivations, joys, pains and desires of a beautiful game.