AS THE GEARS of sport have slowly, thankfully, cranked back to life over the last couple of months, we’ve been hard at work putting together our annual anthology of sportswriting and trying to make sense of a year that, frankly, defies any.

We’re delighted to announce the release of Behind the Lines, No. 4, which is on sale here now, priced at €10.

“Life, as this year has shown us, just isn’t the same,” writes Gavin Cooney in this year’s foreword. “Its framework is a lot more fragile than we’ve ever had cause to countenance before.

“This collection is therefore very different to the one we might have imagined at the start of the year. It was meant to tell tales of glory from the Olympics in Tokyo and the European Championships in Dublin; to tease out the intrigue of a full year under a new rugby head coach and make vivid the summer haze of the GAA Championships.

“Instead, it includes clinical words like social distancing and Covid-19. There’s not even a 1-1 draw in here.”

Here’s the full cover blurb from this year’s book, which hopefully gives you a good flavour of the 20 stories which we felt best represented the year that was and the stories that we produced:

The42 presents Behind the Lines, the fourth collection of the best and most relevant stories, produced by the award-winning team at Ireland’s leading sports website.During a unique sporting year, Murray Kinsella speaks with the former Munster Rugby star who emulated his father by joining the frontline defence against Covid-19, while Kevin O’Brien examines how we grieve during the pandemic, as a town and club pay their respects to a local GAA hero.

Garry Doyle sketches out Jack Charlton’s massive legacy and former Ireland international Curtis Fleming tells Paul Fennessy about growing up as a Black Dubliner in the days before the BLM movement.

Fintan O’Toole celebrates the genius of Maurice Fitzgerald and Eoin Kelly, Sinéad Farrell asks those who were there to recall Bob Marley’s day on the Dalymount Park pitch, and Emma Duffy illustrates how Catherina McKiernan was shaped by her roots.

Read about Liverpool’s title triumph, a trailblazing ladies’ football team… and much more.

Volume IV of this much-loved series is, once again, long-form writing for the sports fan in your life.

To celebrate the launch, we’ve also created a complete collection which includes all four editions of our sportswriting anthology to date.

This collection is available at a special rate of €30 plus postage, but is unfortunately limited and only available while stocks last.