Narrative Non-fiction · Hardback

One More Game

Norwegian title: En kamp til

Thomas KarlsenClaus Lundekvam

There are better footballers than Claus Lundekvam. There are players with faster legs, smoother technique, better tactical sense and last but not least, a better eye for a chance at goal. Lundekvam's old trainer, Gordon Strachan, is reputed to have said that a corpse put in the penalty area would have had a better chance of scoring from a corner than Lundekvam. After all that is said – no Norwegian has played more games in top level English football. 410 appearances for Southampton speak for themselves. During the 12 years he played for the club, he was one of the town's most popular players.

The story of Claus Lundekvam's life as a footballer is an unparalleled success, just as much as the story of his later life is an extraordinary failure. When he hung up his boots in 2008, as the lights went out and the doors of the stadium shut behind him for the last time, he said to himself that now he would set aside two years just to relax. That was the start of a roller coaster of sex and alcohol dependency which ended up with admission to a detoxification clinic.

This is a raw and honest book which borrows as much from rock biographies as from the chronicles of English football. It is a story of trying to tame the wild animal in oneself without losing oneself on the way.