An exhilarating and searing memoir about life as a professional female footballer - and a beautiful examination of the joy and pain of serious athletics‘Riveting ...A paean to the beautiful game’ Los Angeles Times ‘It contained so much of what I love and find endlessly interesting about football ...A very lovely thinker and writer’ Rebecca Watson‘A compelling debut’ Times Literary SupplementIn The Striker and the Clock, Georgia Cloepfil tells the story of her life in football: the triumph, the exhilaration, the deep bonds between teammates, and also the years of self-denial, exile and dedication, in which players try in vain to outpace a clock that ticks down toward an indeterminate ending. What emerges is a profound meditation on what it is to have a body, and what it is to have the compulsion to push it to do the near impossible; and a love letter to the motivations, joys, pains and desires of a beautiful game.