See all Hill’s Booker odds here.

Hills cut Wolf Hall from 12/1 to 2/1 favourite after a string of large-ish bets (in book award betting terms, at least) were placed on Mantel’s book by “literary insiders”.

Does that mean the book can be backed as though defeat was out of the question? In short, no.

The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins attributes Mantel’s steaming to favouritism to the respect Mantel, who has never won the Booker before, has within the publishing industry. She claims there is a feeling that Mantel will be chosen above previous winners like J M Coetzee, William Hill’s original favourite.

That’s all well and good, except that awards bestowed by judging panels don’t necessarily work like that.

Music’s Mercury Prize is a good example. In 2007, Arctic Monkeys and Dizzee Rascal – both previous winners of the award – were overlooked by the judges in favour of Klaxons. But it’s worth noting that so was the more populist Amy Winehouse and, last year, her fellow Brit School songstress Adele and perennial festival favourites British Sea Power, the Last Shadow Puppets and the massive Radiohead.

Plenty of people would have loved to see Radiohead win the award, judged on their career as a whole. But judging panels are a funny, idiosyncratic lot, and they gave the 2008 Mercury Prize to the frankly awful Elbow instead.

Mantel winning would be akin to Sebastian Barry, who for a time was last year’s Booker favourite, winning this year. As it was, Aravind Adiga – originally a 14/1 shot – won the 2008 Booker Prize.

It’s a wide-open longlist again this year, and it’s probably wise to read the books in question – rather than blindly back your favourite author – and make a judgement based on your own idiosyncrasies and preferences.

That’s what the judges will be doing come December.

At its simplest, Netherland is a tale of marginalised outsiders who play with differing fantasies of cricket in post-9/11 New York. Hans van den Broek is a well-off city analyst who turns out for the Staten Island Cricket Club, the only Dutchman in a ramshackle collection of West Indian and East Asian immigrants.

He is seeking to make sense of his life after his English wife heads home to London with their toddler son in the psychologically grim aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, which have forced the van den Broeks out of their home and disrupted their lives.

Through the cricket club Hans meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian, US resident and small-time gangster. Chuck has a plan to turn a disused minor airfield into an international cricket stadium and thus re-introduce cricket to the United States. His idea, never more than a grandiose pipe dream, is destined not to get off the ground; the story opens with Hans finding out that Chuck has been murdered.

Hans tells the twin stories of his relationship with Chuck and his largely passive role in his reunion with his wife and son as a long interior monologue, with digressions interrupting recollections and in turn making way for introspection and theorising. Such action as there is comes from the larger-than-life Chuck and a host of smaller characters; Hans, an analyst outside as well as in the office, seems paralysed to do anything but watch through a grim cloud of depression as the world – or at least George W Bush’s USA – falls apart.

But through Hans’s recollections, the reader senses that Hans’s trauma is only ostensibly connected with the 9/11 attacks. His father was killed when he was two years old and we learn that, a year before the twin towers went down, his mother died. It is this latter event that has dislocated Hans from life, and the novel covertly deals with his adjustment to it.

Without wanting to make the novel seem too obviously Freudian – it is, in fairness, much more subtle – Mrs van den Broek looms over Hans’s obsession with cricket. She used to watch Hans play for the local team in Holland when he was a child; he remembers how he found her watching them play without him when he was older; the discovery seems to trigger a sense that something but him should be at the centre of her world.

Cricket as a symbol for family
Cricket, for him, is a symbol for family: the fatherless boy Hans found a surrogate family in the local cricket club, with Mother watching; the wifeless and motherless man Hans finds it on Staten Island. Cricket for him is a soporific influence; it lends itself to self-analysis and introspection – his strengths and, evidently, his weaknesses.

For the Trinidadian Chuck, cricket is something else; it is a way to create an identity for himself as another kind of alienated alien in the chaos of New York’s underbelly. West Indian international cricket rose to world dominance as the Caribbean islanders’ way of sticking two fingers up at the imperial Massa, and social historians of cricket will see in Chuck the same drive to make his mark on the world’s consciousness.

Chuck, as much as Hans, sees cricket as a surrogate for family; he lost his hero, his brother, in childhood, and is unable to commit himself wholly to his wife (believing it isn’t fair to burden all a man’s needs on one woman). But he also finds family, like F Scott Fitgerald’s Great Gatsby, in shady eastern European gangsters, which leads to his eventual death.

If you build it, they still won’t come
Ultimately, Netherland suggests that cricket has no place in the USA. Hans goes back to England to win back his family; Chuck’s dreams of intercontinental cricketing harmony founder with his body in a New York canal; even if you build it, they still won’t come, the novel hints.

If Netherland has a fault it lies perhaps in its trying to be too many things. There are livelier studies of the underbelly of American society (Neil Gaiman’s American Godsbeing a personal favourite) and many better studies of psychological breakdowns. And despite comparisons, it’s certainly no modern-day Great Gatsby.

That said, it is a far better cricket novel than, say, Shoeless Joe(the novel that Field of Dreams was based on) is a baseball novel, and should have won the William Hill award. While Marcus Trescothick’s book is undeniably a good personal story, and a fascinating insight into the world of professional cricketers, Netherland should come to be seen as something more. It transcends cricket – a game that can itself seem to transcend human experience – and can be called a truly great novel.

Buy Netherland from Amazon now.

McGovern admits he hasn’t read the six books on the all-female shortlist, but says he’s passing on “a whisper”, which may or may not be the fact that William Hill make the novel its 2/1 favourite to win the award.

With its themes of rape allegations and racism in Jim Crow Deep South, Scottsboro evokes memories of perennial sixth-form favourite To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s also based on a true story, and both these factors could work in its favour.

According to Waterstones, the case “kick-started America’s Civil Rights movement,” which may be pushing things a bit. There was a Depression, a World War and a quarter of a century before Rosa Parks choice of bus seat became the focal point of a new black consciousness, one whose message spread nationwide thanks to the 1950s spread of television.

Still, although McGovern glibly dismisses the comments of the Orange Prize’s head judge as “the kind of c**p these broads come out with,” but he’s being disingenuous. He doesn’t generally offer up a tip unless he knows what he’s talking about and comments may well be macho posturing. Anyone interested in a bet on the Orange Prize could do worse than follow his advice and take Hill’s 2/1.

You can also get 40 per cent off Scottsboro at Amazon.

These are just a few of the questions answered by A Social History of English Cricketby Derek Birley. The answer usually given by this book, the winner of the 1999 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, is simply that cricket organised itself so as to be “not football”.

Cricket: it’s not football
If football did it, cricket’s ruling body decreed that it was probably urban (and hence bad), almost certainly working class (and hence bad), possibly popular (and hence bad) and potentially profitable (and hence tantamount to devil worship).

From its very beginnings, where gambling-mad gentry folk paid big-hitting farmers to turn out for the cricket teams they and their friends played in as amateurs, cricket defined itself as a rural, genteel and elitist game that would have no truck with the vulgarities of money.

Thus cricket emerged as a social and financial basket case: it refused to succumb to the professionalism that had sullied the northern rugby and association football codes; its leagues were made up of county (ie, rural) teams, and its games were played during the week and, even in the age of floodlights, during the day.

Nobody watched it, which proved to the MCC – the game’s ruling body for most of its history – that things were going well: no fans meant no football fans. Result.

MCC: delusional
Their obsession with doing whatever football seems simply delusional at times: the MCC refused to organise the County Championship on league lines until well into the twentieth century and clubs could organise their own fixtures.

Counties could just arrange to play as weak opposition as possible all season, and the club with the best record won the Championship. Even winning was discouraged (the taking part being the thing that counted). And so the fact – incomprehensible to non-cricketers – that a game could be played for longer than a week (in the days before Tests were limited to five days) and still end up as a draw.

Other book reviews of Birley’s Social History have complained that it offers a “lefty” view that criticises the sport’s gloriously genteel heritage.

But I’d ask those reviewers to point to a time when county cricket ever got big crowds, or was financially viable. It never has and never did, and romanticising rural cricket is based purely on a fictional myth.

The MCC couldn’t maintain the myth, of course. In the urban centres of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and London – still home to the principle Test venues today - thriving leagues emerged with professional players, Saturday one-day games and, hence, good crowds and profitable businesses.

And ultimately the hated market forces won. Amateurism is long gone and cricket is now dominated by one-day games, 20Twenty and tournaments like the IPL. The top players aren’t even employed by county sides, but centrally contracted to international boards or independent bodies like the IPL.

Some might say thank God – had Cricket stuck to being everything football wasn’t, it might not exist today.

Birley is a bit sketchy on details – I couldn’t tell you exactly when the County Championship became a proper league, because he doesn’t say, and it’s often difficult to follow events chronologically – but A Social History of English Cricketis a decent attempt to explode English cricket’s defining – and entirely fictional – myth.

Forget the cod philosophy of Shanks, Cloughie and other mildly unhinged egotists, David Winner’s homage to the “sexy football” of the Netherlands makes some serious points about how nations develop their footballing principles. And all perennial underachievers – England and Scotland included – can learn from its pages.

Until the late 1960s Dutch football was amateurish at every level. Its league was organised by outdated buffoons; the national side a consistent model of failure.

The arrival at Ajax of players like Bennie Muller, Piet Keizer and the young Johann Cruyff changed the Amsterdam’s club image and, ultimately, that of the Holland side too.

Under disciplinarian Rinus Michels – who would coach the Dutch to their only triumph, in the 1988 European Championship – Ajax won a European Cup and Holland reached a World Cup Final.

The spectre of World Cup 74 looms over the book. Cruyff’s Holland, by now used to swatting sides away with their superior, flowing, tactical football, came up against a West Germany team that wanted to win rather than be clever and stylish, and lost 2-1 despite taking an early lead.

The match defined Dutch football forever after. Losing to the Germans seared the defeat into the national consciousness. The Dutch branded themselves as the true players of the beautiful game, prepared to look good at all costs – and even at the expense of winning.

Thus players like Dennis Bergkamp are blessed with some of the finest skills ever to grace a football pitch – and the killer instincts of a Disney ladybird. The national team is packed full of players who would rather play the ball out of defence than make an ugly clearance that could protect a one-goal lead.

In short, the Dutch have boxed themselves into a corner that no amount of Cruyff turns can get them out of. With the polish still gleaming on the European Championship trophy won by Spain last summer, the Netherlands has inherited the mantle of World football’s biggest underachievers.

Airports, dykes and possession football
Winner makes some interesting comparisons between aspects of Dutch society and its football team.

The history of Holland is one of claiming and protecting space: creating it from the sea where none existed before; draining it and guarding it with dykes.

The Dutch, Winner argues, have learned to value space and, in turn, prize it above everything else on the football pitch.

From the generation of Cruyff and Neeskens to Ruud van Nistelrooy and Wes Sneijder, the Dutch game has been defined by intelligent use of space – wingers running wide when the Dutch are in possession; defenders pushing up the pitch to compress the play when the opposition have the ball.

This principle doesn’t sound too rare until you consider the use of aerial space in Dutch football. Consider some of the greatest goals scored by Dutchmen – van Basten against the USSR in 1988; Bergkamp against Argentina in Marseille ten years later; Sneijder against the Italians in 2008 – and you’re struck by the use of the aerial ball, more so than in Brazilian or Italian football, for example.

It can be seen as a typically Dutch way of using available space to its maximum potential – just as, in another modern-day context, they have done with Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport: a functional collection of buildings that again show off a Dutch love of efficiency of space; recycling it, maximising it and protecting it lovingly.

It’s a shame for the Dutch that World Cups aren’t awarded on the creation and protection of space.

Winner compares his subject to things like airports and dykes intelligently and with ease, and the book benefits from an intellectual approach more common to esoteric sports like cricket and baseball than something like football. The Dutch would be proud.

Trapped by national myths
The Dutch, of course, aren’t the only underachievers in world football. And they aren’t the only nation trapped by a self-created national myth.

Winner’s observations on the Dutch national psyche can be extended to look at English and Scottish football.

The English don’t like winning. Like the Dutch, we’ve defined our footballing national image by a series of defeats, mainly on penalties but also on miserable nights overseen by people like Graham Taylor and Steve MacLaren.

There’s also brave attempts; fighting back from 2-0 down against Argentina in 1986; holding out when down to ten men against the same country in 1998; a gutsy 0-0 draw in Rome to qualify for that World Cup.

But as we’ve seen over the years with Sven Goran Ericsson, give the English a 1-0 lead and they’ll do their best to throw it away.

Penalty shoot-outs are a frequent bugbear, and one shared by the Dutch. Winner devotes some time to the problem which, ultimately, he believes, is a psychological one (hence the book’s subtitle, The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football.

Fabio Capello has been employed to sort out the England team’s own psychological problems; he could do worse than making them read Brilliant Orange.