Will appeal to readers ready and willing to embrace the deep affinities among the craft and discipline of sport … An allusive, self-aware, culturally aware and, above all, thoughtful book

TLS

A book of uncommonly honest insight, full of wisdom won not through adulation but persistence

WASHINGTON POST

Georgia Cloepfil has written a nimble, breathtaking book about the beautiful game, and about her beautiful, brutal life playing it. It reveals so much about the strange, hard path of a young woman pursuing a career as a professional soccer player, but it is far more interesting than an ordinary story of passion, promise, setback, and success. It is, instead, a cleareyed exploration of what passion, promise, setback, and success even mean

Louisa Thomas, sportswriter for the New Yorker

Riveting ... A paean to the beautiful game, the book chronicles how Cloepfil overcame adversity to strike joy

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Former footballer Georgia Cloepfil offers a unique and fascinating insight into the mind of a professional athlete in this memoir. Written in 90 “minute long” passages, Cloepfil covers the joys of camaraderie, the agony of injury, and what it means to push yourself to your absolute limits in pursuit of what can inevitably only ever be time-limited excellence

EVENING STANDARD

With the deft and determined movements of a seasoned player, Georgia Cloepfil writes about what it means to endure and what it means to leave a sport behind. In her first book, The Striker and the Clock, Cloepfil examines her elusive ambitions and redirected energies

Leanne Shapton, author of Swimming Studies