In The Striker and the Clock, Georgia Cloepfil tells the story of her life in football: the triumph, the exhilaration, the deep bonds between teammates, and also the years of self-denial, exile and dedication, in which players try in vain to outpace a clock that ticks down toward an indeterminate ending. Threading between floodlit pitches, sparse dorm rooms, and doctors offices, Cloepfil outlines an obsessive pursuit: one that sees her begin each day by touching the ball 1000 times, running sprints alone on empty fields and practicing near-constant visualisation & revisualisation of triumph and despair. What emerges is a profound meditation on what it is to have a body, and what it is to have the compulsion to push it to do the near impossible; and a love letter to the motivations, joys, pains and desires of a beautiful game.
