Some welcome additions but a few fill a much-needed gap

GAA historians Mark Duncanand Paul Rousewade through the mountain of new GAA books and come up with a few gems.

There was a time when it was common for several years to pass without a book being published on the GAA. Not anymore. The rise and rise of the GAA is reflected in the small library of books which have emerged over the last decade.

History and autobiography dominate. As yet, no GAA memoir has descended to the level of the English FA Premier League, where many players appear not to have read - let alone written - their own "autobiographies".

That being said, this year's GAA books are a mixed bag.

Perhaps the most eagerly anticipated and, ultimately, the most disappointing is Mick O'Dwyer's autobiography Blessed and Obsessed(Blackwater Press, priced €18.95). Few would dispute the importance of O'Dwyer's contribution to the game, but the sheer scale of his career as a player and a manager presents a challenge that this book is unable to negotiate.

This is particularly disappointing as Blessed and Obsessedstarts promisingly, with O'Dwyer railing against all those who imply that he is a mercenary and the malicious rumours about the scale of the expenses he supposedly receives: "How dare people judge me when they haven't a clue as to my real motivation."

But, in fact, there are few enough clues on offer here. By the final page, you are left in no doubt what O'Dwyer has won, but there is no genuine insight into the how and why.

Ultimately, his management style is painted solely in broad strokes - get players super-fit, get them to play open football and motivate them.

Beyond this, there is little elaboration, which is a real pity.

How did he create the greatest team of all time?

How did he win Leinster football championships with two counties - Kildare and Laois - who had spent decades without success?

There are occasional glimpses into O'Dwyer's psyche - not least when he admits that managing Kildare to win the Leinster title in 1998 gave him more enjoyment that any of his other successes as a player or a manager. Similarly, his account of the offence he felt towards the end of his time with Laois, when some of the players suggested that his methods were outdated, seems genuine and revealing.

The gaps are many, however. You never get a meaningful insight into how O'Dwyer related to the men he played with, or the men he managed. In his lovely 1974 memoir, A Kerry Footballer, Mick O'Connell wrote of his relationship with O'Dwyer and nights spent driving home to South Kerry from training: "I doubt if any two sportsmen in Ireland knew each other's game and thoughts on the game as well as we did." There is no sense of any of this - or of a similar relationship with any other contemporary - in O'Dwyer's book.

The best book about Mick O'Dwyer remains Owen McCrohan's 1990 biography in which he observed: "People close to him are well aware of his capacity for saying one thing and meaning something else. His diplomatic and inoffensive nature is such that his public pronouncements are often at variance with his inmost thoughts."

Jack O'Connor takes a different tack in his book, The Keys to the Kingdom(Penguin Ireland, priced €18.99). Where O'Dwyer is guarded, O'Connor is open, and the result is an altogether better book. O'Connor opens the door to the world of the obsessive inter-county manager.

He documents his relationship with his players, his selectors, the county board and the famed Kerry supporter. In doing this he seems honest and brave, but holds back just enough to avoid the accusation of disloyalty.

What marks this book out is O'Connor's willingness to admit flaws and misjudgments, and his capacity to laugh at himself. That being said, his portrait of himself as an outsider is repetitive and irritating.

It's there throughout - O'Dwyer never rang to wish him luck in the job, the All-Ireland medal-winning boys from the 1970s and 1980s were against his appointment, and on and on.

You can almost imagine him staking out a pub before he goes in for a pint just to make sure Spillane or Deenihan or the Bomber aren't down the back playing pitch-and-toss with their All-Ireland medals.

O'Connor might heed the words of Maurice Hayes, the politician, diplomat and Down football connoisseur, who wrote that Kerry football people, "didn't go around worrying, because they knew they were good and they didn't have to prove it every day of the week".

Hayes' advice appears in his contribution to Weeshie Fogarty's, Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan: A Man Before His Time(Wolfhound Press, priced 14.99). This fine book is a collection of essays celebrating the life of Kerry's first famed GAA trainer, Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan, who won eight All-Ireland football championships between 1924 and 1962.

The value of this book lies not just in the contributions from former players, who document exactly how O'Sullivan went about his business, but more in what it tells you about life in Kerry from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Like most collections, the quality rises and falls. Ultimately, the best articles are those which recall O'Sullivan's career as Resident Medical Superintendent in St Finian's psychiatric hospital in Killarney.

Another major Killarney institution, St Brendan's College, features in the early life of former GAA president Seán Kelly. He attended "The Sem" in the late 1960s alongside John O'Keeffe, who would soon write his legend as one of the game's greatest full backs.

Kelly followed a less glamorous path to national prominence. Working his way steadily though the ranks of GAA administration, he became the first Kerryman to rise to the presidency in 2003. How he climbed to such high office we don't know.

His flawed autobiography Rule 42 and All That(Gill & Macmillan, priced €24.99) says only that he never lost an election, when readers might have expected some insight into the lobbying, the alliances and the deals that must have been forged and brokered along the way.

Kelly's reluctance to turn a critical eye on himself, and his diminution of the contribution of others to the opening of Croke Park, take from what is otherwise an interesting book. He lifts the lid on the strained inner workings of Croke Park and, even if he is surprisingly ungenerous to some of the permanent staff who have served the association well, his candour gives the book a much-needed edge.

Elsewhere, though, Kelly pulls more punches then he throws. The Government's role in sabotaging efforts to open Croke Park in 2001 merits deeper analysis and a tendency to caricature opposition to the opening of Croke Park fails to reflect the complexity of the actual debate.

For all that, this is a valuable book. The amending of Rule 42 (it is not deleted) was a landmark moment in Irish sporting history and Kelly's memoir will serve as a key work of reference, if not a definitive source.

The sheer volume of literature available on Kerry football suggests a people perhaps a little too comfortable with their self-image as the GAA's leading lights. So it is with some trepidation that one turns to Joe Ó Muircheartaigh and TJ Flynn's Princes of Pigskin: A Century of Kerry Footballers(The Collins Press, priced €24.95). The potential for a love-in here is immense, with generations of Kerry footballers, their medals pinned to their chests, sharing one big hug.

What actually emerges is a revelation. This is a brilliant book, beautifully produced, elegant, and charming. It is a timely reminder that football is about playing a game. And doing so without needing a grant from taxpayers to get through the torture of it all.

The book is full of lovely stories about footballers, the things they did and the things that happened to them. The articles on each player are short, but compelling, and the photographs alone make the book worth buying.

From the first star of Gaelic football, Dick Fitzgerald, through to the most recent one, Kieran Donaghy, you get a sense of the remarkably diverse range of people who play Gaelic football - even to the level of winning All-Ireland medals.

It does this book a disservice to say merely that it would make an ideal Christmas present. It is far more than that. It is one of the finest books produced on the GAA and is something to be treasured by all GAA people, not just Kerry ones.

Despite this, after reading book after book on Kerry football, it comes as a blessed relief to turn to Michael Foley's Kings of September(O'Brien Press, priced €14.95). You don't have to be from Offaly to delight in the story of how Kerry were denied the five-in-a-row in 1982.

This book deservedly won the Boylesports Sports Book of the Year Award. It is a story told from the inside, through the words of both sets of players. It shows how Offaly progressed, year-on-year, from a county which was not even in the list of contenders to one which could take on the game's aristocrats and win.

Foley expertly reconstructs the 1982 season and the book builds to a crescendo as Séamus Darby outfoxes Tommy Doyle and shoots the goal that brings the Sam Maguire to Offaly. You know it still hurts from Kerry goalkeeper Charlie Nelligan's almost photographic memory of stooping to pick up the ball as the umpire waved the green flag and the raindrops shake out of the net and on to his back.

The story of the Offaly team of the early 1980s is one of incremental improvement and final deliverance. Not that one necessarily begets the other. A read of Keith Duggan's House of Pain: Through the Rooms of Mayo Football(Mainstream Publishing, priced €14.99) is proof enough of that.

It is hard to approach anything to do with Mayo football without a sense of impending doom, but Duggan confounds expectations in spectacular style. This is a brilliant book, the writing sparkling throughout.

Despite not winning an All-Ireland title since 1951, the footballers of Mayo retain an extraordinary mystique. Much of it is founded on the big, flamboyant personalities of those who have played and managed with the county.

Many of them feature in this book: Carney, O'Mahony, Maughan and McHale (some men get by on one name) come across as intelligent football men and they - and others - open up to Duggan as he picks through the wreckage of Mayo's serial disappointments.

This book spans more than a half a century and never flags. Surprisingly, some of the strongest passages centre on the especially barren period of the 1970s and early 1980s, when provincial titles, let alone All-Irelands, proved elusive.

The chapters on Ted Webb and John Morley - two county players who were tragically killed within five years of each other - are remarkably poignant in their portrayal of the interwoven worlds of football, family and community.

And then there are the All-Ireland finals. Duggan revisits the dark September days of 1989, 1996, 2004 and 2006 through the experiences of those inside the team set-ups. This is a story full of trauma and pathos and Mayo readers might be best advised to read it in support groups.

As for the future of Mayo football, the Ballina midfielder David Brady offers a possible roadmap. What is needed, he says, is a change of attitude and style. "Nice guys win f*** all," he tells Duggan. "If you want to beat Kerry you got to do it mean . . . Maybe that's a demand we don't make on ourselves in Mayo."

One man who understands what it takes to beat Kerry and win All-Irelands (with club and county) is Oisín McConville. His autobiography, The Gambler: The Oisín McConville Story(Mainstream publishing, priced ) is an unflinchingly honest account of a driven footballer and a troubled life.

The book is the better for McConville's willingness to cast himself in an unflattering light and the depressed, lonely figure that emerges as he recounts his battle with a gambling addiction will be startling to anyone familiar only with his swaggering, sometimes arrogant, on-field persona.

But there is much more to this book than simply the revelation of that gambling compulsion. McConville belongs to a uniquely successful generation of Crossmaglen and Armagh footballers and he gives a fascinating inside view of the driving obsession of both.

He also offers perspectives on many of the top players that McConville has played with and against. Some are affectionate, others most definitely not. Tyrone defenders Ryan McMenamin and Enda Gormley ship particularly heavy criticism and this book, you sense, may become an intriguing subplot in future encounters involving these players.

Ultimately, the story of McConville is one of an all-consuming football life. Even when he's away from the routine of training and games, McConville admits to a "feeling of guilt when I'm not doing something that will contribute a little more to the team". But there is no regret and no whinging. Instead, there is the refreshing acknowledgement from an inter-county player that he has gotten as much from the game as he has given to it.

Roland Tormey's Summertime Blues: Dublin's Epic Journey to a Historic All-Ireland(Mainstream Publishing, priced €14.99) is an altogether different type of GAA book. The writer returns to the sun-drenched summer of Dublin's All-Ireland win in 1995 and recalls what it was like to experience the team's championship journey from the outside, as a supporter in the pubs and on the terraces.

In charting Tormey's deepening obsession with the Dublin football team of the early 1990s, this book intersperses personal reminiscences with detailed accounts of matches and forays into social and cultural commentary. It's a bold, ambitious approach, but you sense on occasion that Tormey has given himself too broad a canvas to work on.

This is a book firmly rooted in a particular juncture in history and Tormey succeeds in evoking a time when both the Dublin team and the country at large appeared at a crossroads in their development. He also sheds light on the nature of the Dublin team's phenomenal summer support. He revels in the excitement and fervour of the Hill 16 experience and provides a genuine insight into the psychology of this tribe of supporters.

The problem with this is that Tormey - a late convert to the GAA - appears drawn as much by the spectacle as the sport. Had his curiosity taken him beyond the inter-county circus and into one of the large number of local clubs that lie beneath, you sense this journey might have reached truly epic proportions.

A striking feature of the literature published on the GAA over the past year is the pre-eminence of football. Even so, it has not been an entirely fallow year for hurling books. Tim Horgan's Christy Ring: Hurling's Greatest(The Collins Press, priced €24.95) is a fine piece of work and a valuable companion to Val Dorgan's more personal biography, which is now 27 years old.

Horgan's book is underpinned by exhaustive research and he makes extensive use of newspaper reports in chronicling Ring's extraordinary hurling life. In that sense, it is both a valuable work of reference and an act of commemoration.

There is no shortage of other people's perspectives on Ring in this book, but Horgan wisely concludes by allowing the great man to speak for himself: "Hurling has always been a way of life with me. It was never my ambition to play the game for the sake of winning All-Ireland medals or breaking records, but to perfect the art as well as possible."