Novelist, Sportswriter and All-Ireland minor hurling winner Tadhg Coakley ruminates on the importance of sport in his life. He reflects on the joys of sport, as player and fan, and sport’s pervasive influence, good and bad, on humanity.

Why is sport so important to us?
Is it because we make it so important to us?
Something so silly and worthless, but at the same time so vital.
What’s that all about?

The Game is a multifaceted reflection on sport. It is part memoir, outlining Tadhg Coakley’s time as a player and fan, and how sport has shaped his life. But it also tackles sport on a universal scale – the good and the bad – and its immeasurable influence on our world.

For fans, sport can be all-consuming. Indeed, we are consuming sport in ever greater gulpfuls, often blindly. It has a dark side; it is rife with corruption, sexism, homophobia, nationalism and a raft of toxic masculine behaviour, and Coakley interrogates his own attitudes on each of these fronts.

On the other hand, sport builds all manner of valuable connections and communities, and in sport – as in art – people can forge their own identities with grace, imagination and the possibility of what may be. This duality is one of the most fascinating aspects of sport.

Written with warmth, openness and keen insight, The Game is an entertaining and thought-provoking meditation on the uniquely intense highs and lows of loving sport in today’s world.