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.

Georgia Cloepfil is a writer and a women's soccer coach. Cloepfil became infatuated with soccer as a child and throughout her twenties played on women's professional and semi-professional teams all over the world, from Korea to Australia to Sweden. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post and the Yale Review, as well as many other publications. The Striker and the Clock was shortlisted for the 2022 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. georgiacloepfil.com