Gregor Paul

If you're not from New Zealand, you could be forgiven for not knowing that New Zealand's national rugby football team won the Rugby World Cup in October last year, for the first time in 24 years.

Few New Zealanders have that excuse. Only one who had been holed up in a Tibetan monastery since the Nineteen Eighties wouldn't know, in grim detail, of the travails of the New Zealand All Blacks. The All Blacks are, bar none, the most successful major sporting franchise on the planet, but they have a habit of world-conquering at all material times except the only material time: the four yearly World Cup. At that point, as my English friends delight in reminding me, the All Blacks habitually, inexplicably, choke.

For that monastic sort of kiwi Gregor Paul's new e-book might be of interest (at any rate for those resident at monasteries possessed of e-readers and wifi).

And there's the rub: it is difficult to know to whom else this fiercely hagiographic e-book will appeal.

Gregor Paul is New Zealand resident, but hails from Scotland. He's been the chief rugby correspondent for a New Zealand Sunday paper for eight years, and on the breadth of that experience he has founded this book.

In its analytical depth Redemption bears the hallmarks of that newspaper journalism heritage, in that coverage is wide and shallow rather than narrow and deep: nothing wrong with that unless your target market happens to harbour a national obsession with your subject, in which case there is little on that method they won't already know. This might not have mattered, either, were a big, glossy book festooned with photos of the heroic journey, suitable for father's day. But it is an e-book: it has little value as a souvenir; it can't sit on a coffee table, and it hasn't got any pictures.

Paul does pitch a deeper story, which is why I bought it: The secret of how coach Graham Henry turned "twenty four years of hurt" into final victory. This sounded like it might offer something along the lines of Michael Lewis' vastly superior baseball memoir, Moneyball. There is certainly scope for it: as Lewis demonstrates, the potential benefits of technology and statistical analytics in sport are huge, and since Clive Woodward's extraordinary achievements with a fairly ordinary England squad at the 2003 Rugby World Cup (at which New Zealand once again choked), the potential of such techniques in rugby has been plain to see.

But of this there is little. Part of the problem is that, even in 2011, the All Blacks very nearly choked: the last 60 minutes of the world cup final felt a great deal like another disastrous melt-down, and when it finally came, victory over a French team, whom the All Blacks had thumped once in the tournament already, was by only a point. Had the ball bounced differently - indeed, had the French fly-half not badly shanked a penalty kick with 15 minutes remaining, Graham Henry's revolution would have come to naught.

You could forgive that, too, for a father's day potboiler, had Paul much talent as a writer. The British Isles may have disappointing rugby teams, but it is blessed with absurdly literate rugby journalists: correspondents like the Sunday Times' Stephen Jones write especially well even if New Zealanders feel deeply that they don't know what they're talking about. (Jones is a particular bete noire in New Zealand, something he takes great pride in).

Alas, Gregor Paul is no Stephen Jones. His style is a dead-eye pastiche of the "Kiwi Vernacular", a local dialect in which entire paragraphs are assembled from clichés, platitudes, truisms and mixed metaphors. Now if you're not bothered about picturesque writing - in fairness, not all rugby-mad Kiwis are - this will seem a petty quibble. But it drove me up the wall.

I suspect Paul dictated, rather than typed, his manuscript. This style would sound less offensive in conversation than it looks in print. Of McCaw he says: "He was in for the long haul and his country needed him, really needed him to be captain fantastic". Elsewhere he writes, "from having been on the edge of the abyss, staring into the dark yonder and relentless emptiness, the All Blacks set off for a six game tour of Asia and the UK in late October with a chance to make history."

Nor is Paul an assertive writer: he liberally uses qualifiers like "potentially" and "possibly" and often writes in the passive voice, occasionally allowing meaning to leach away altogether: "it was a squad that engendered a level of optimism".

These examples are respresentative of the entire text. This is dreadful, dreadful writing.

E-books are easily, and cheaply published: if you have text, you have an e-book. But this is no excuse not to expend effort on the text. This book is under-edited and feels particularly rushed.

There is the kernel of a decent book in here, but it needs far more work: more effort to present the personalities (there are five main, very different, characters), the technical details of the All Blacks' strategy, some photos (this would work much better as a physical book where design, layout and images help to tell the story), and crucially, far more time working to make the text presentable.… (plus d'informations)