William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award

The winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award will be announced tomorrow from what is generally agreed to be a strong shortlist. Once again, however, there is a sense of the usual suspects being rounded up.

There is an unghosted autobiography from a privately educated sporting hero (Matthew Pinsent); a detailed examination of a sporting crisis (the D'Oliveira Affair); a cricket diary (by the estimable Ed Smith); a history of a football club (Real Madrid); and a personal odyssey through an esoteric sport (fell running). Once again fiction is not represented. Indeed, in the 16 years of the competition, a work of fiction has not made the starting line-up.

Which is strange because not so long ago (see eclectic selection to the right) sports fiction was prevalent. And this even when the genre is defined tightly so as to exclude novels about sport, such as Philip Roth's romp The Great American Novel or Fred Exley's The Fan , and include only novels written from the point of view of a sportsperson. There was clearly a market for turning the stuff of comics into an adult read.

Yet now the form is destitute. Despite all the media coverage given to sport in the past decade - and football, in particular - I cannot recall a single novel in which a footballer is the central character. Perhaps if Tom Wolfe were British, he might, instead of hanging around on the edge of frat parties, have spent his time detailing the comings and goings in Scuffles Nite Klub and written a sporting Bonfire of the Vanities about the new Masters of the Universe. But he isn't and no one else has stepped up to the bar.

Rereading my shortlist, I was most struck by their innocence and pathos. In each of them, the tightly knit sporting world, replete with rules and status, provides a fitting backdrop for a conflict of character. In a way, with fairly obvious white hats and black hats, they most resemble westerns. Yet they are, by and large, satisfying and entertaining.

Not one of them, of course, is written by a celebrated sportsman. And the decline of sports fiction coincides with their deadening and malign appearance on the scene. The rot started in the late 1960s, when Denis Law, Graham Hill and Garry Sobers allowed their names to be attached to works of fiction. When I showed Sobers a copy of the book wot he supposedly wrote, he couldn't have been more alarmed if it had been entitled 'I am a Paedophile' rather than Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade .

Soon afterwards, Terry Venables became marginally involved in writing a series of private detective novels. Legend has it that the sum of his contribution to one effort written with/by Gordon Williams was as follows: 'There's a naked blonde on the bed. Dead. And underneath the bed a suitcase stuffed with a million nicker. All yours, Gordon.'

Meanwhile, horse-racing fiction moved seamlessly from Francis to Francome without any noticeable improvement. Across the shelves, the mantra that 'it makes sense to write about what you know' has been updated to 'it makes business sense to get someone else to write about what you know'. Time is money and ghosts are cheap. Everyone has a novel inside them, so let's publish novels seemingly written by people that other people have at least heard of. Cover over content, mes amis . Lunch anyone?