Signed: "Kyran Bracken" ISBN 0 75286 844 6 Published by Orion Books, 2004 Hardback. 278pp. Dust-jacket, binding and pages in excellent condition, although the d/j is price-clipped. Dust-jacket blurb says: "When Kyran Bracken burst onto the international rugby scene in 1993, just a few days after his twenty-second birthday, he was up against the most feared opponents in world rugby: New Zealand. Early in the game he suffered ankle ligament damage after being stamped on, but he battled through to help England beat the All Blacks. His against-the-odds triumph was almost a snapshot of the ten-year international career that would follow. For Bracken isn’t just an extremely talented scrum-half for whom everything seems to come easily. As he reveals in his moving and powerful autobiography, things have never been straightforward. His battle to hold on to the No. 9 shirt, first with Dewi Morris then Matt Dawson, is well known. So is his recurrent struggle with injuries, particularly the back problems that saw him visiting Eileen Drewery, Glenn Hoddle’s controversial faith healer. But what is not generally known, or written about by sports stars, is the pressure he, like so many of our top athletes, was under. He reveals just how it affected him, and how he fought to cope with the situation. Bracken looks back over a remarkable career that has seen English rugby move from an amateur game run in an amateurish way, to one that is highly professional, very ambitious and brilliantly successful, as was finally proved on that famous night in Sydney in November 2003. This is a unique insight into the changing world of rugby from one of the sport’s most successful players.;
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