What a save: The William Hill's Sports Book of the Year finalists

On Tuesday afternoon at the flagship Waterstone's bookshop in London's West End, the winner of the 22nd William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award will receive £22,000 in cash, plus a £2,000 bet, a day at the races and a bespoke, leather-bound copy of the victorious book.

But if Open: An Autobiogaphy (Harper, £8.99) scoops the prize and the former American tennis champ Andre Agassi steps forward to receive the plaudits and publicity, one JR Moehringer, if indeed he is present, could be forgiven a wry smile – for it was he who actually wrote the book.

The judges of the Bookie Award, as it's affectionately known, obviously have no issue with this, having already twice awarded the prize to ghostwritten "autobiographies": the multiple Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong's It's not About the Bike in 2000 and the troubled England batsman Marcus Trescothick's Coming Back to Me in 2008. But whether a literary award should be given to someone who didn't actually decide on the order in which the words were written down is surely open to debate.

Not that Moehringer is likely to be complaining too strenuously, because he was doubtless amply rewarded. By and large, the bigger the sporting star, the more accomplished the ghost, because the promise of ample sales justifies spending a goodly deal of time and money on the enterprise.

Agassi actively sought out the Pulitzer Prize-winning Moehringer after reading one of his books, while the Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson's choice of his fellow Scot Hugh McIlvanney as his collaborator, the undoubted doyen of British sports journalism for some decades, is likely to have been motivated as much by their friendship and shared background as any literary considerations. In contrast, the England footballers Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney were probably not intimately acquainted with the oeuvre of their ghost, the vastly experienced Hunter Davies, who was presumably recommended by the publishers.

But a high-profile sports star and a talented author are not an automatic guarantee of success; while Gazza: My Story sold more than 350,000 copies in hardback, Rooney's anodyne effort was, by comparison, a flop. After 20-odd pages you could almost hear Davies sigh as he obediently recorded his charge's observation: "I had an ordinary childhood, really." Tales of crafty ciggies and saucy slappers were conspicuous by their absence, and the public weren't fooled.

Lower down the fame chain, budgets tend to be tighter, the number of hours spent interviewing fewer, and the ghostwriter usually works for a flat fee rather than sharing in the royalties.

The ghosts are almost exclusively sports journalists, mainly because they get to know the players and their agents in the course of their daily round. Some have also built up trust by ghosting news-paper columns – which the player concerned often doesn't bother to read, either before or after publication.

At this level, all concerned are aware that mere sporting anecdotes will rarely suffice. To shift copies and earn lucrative serialisation, something more sensational is required: boozing, birding, gambling, drug-taking if the personality concerned is safely retired, or preferably all four. (For a recent example of this sub-genre, look no further than Savage!, the self-regarding life and times of the Derby County midfielder and all-round nuisance Robbie Savage.)

A minority of sportsmen, of course, are capable of telling their story unaided, though it doesn't always take much writing. As long ago as 1955, the England footballer Len Shackleton included a chapter entitled "The Average Director's Knowledge of Football" in his memoirs. Once there, the reader was confronted by a solitary blank page. In the 1970s, the dyspeptic honesty of the footballer Eamon Dunphy's Only a Game? caused a stir that the more recent cricket generation of Mike Atherton and Ed Smith have trained on nicely, while only this month another former Republic of Ireland international, John Giles, has published his self-penned life story and views on the game, doubtless helped by his many years as a newspaper columnist.

Another former player turned journalist, Brian Moore, features on the Bookie shortlist with Beware of the Dog (Simon & Schuster, £17.99). The 1995 memoirs of English rugby's favourite pit bull were a conventional, ghosted affair, but he wrote this unaided and the book is, to quote the author, "darker than its predecessor". It begins with a graphic account of his sexual abuse at the age of 10, and goes on to reveal how his adoption and feelings of rejection contributed to the self-destructive, nasty streak he now owns up to. Was he unable to share these thoughts with his ghost? Were they at odds with the first publisher's brief? Whatever the answer, by taking sole control Moore has produced a far more interesting read, if an uncomfortable one.

Also written from the heart is the autobiographical Blood Knots (Atlantic, £16.99), bidding to become the first book about angling to claim the prize. Except, of course, that it's not just about angling. While Luke Jennings chronicles his obsessive pursuit from an early age of just about every species of English freshwater fish, he weaves in other subtle strands: childhood innocence, paternal love, deep friendship. The mood switches from the joyful, "billowing, wind-in-the-sails sense of freedom" he finds in fishing to the darkly brooding – all written with wit and humour, and intensely personal throughout.

As in politics, there is a third way: neither a ghosted nor self-penned account but a biography, into which category falls this year's football offering on the shortlist. Trautmann's Journey (Yellow Jersey, £16.99) explores the extraordinary odyssey of the legendary Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann, from Hitler Youth member and Second World War Luftwaffe paratrooper to the darling of Maine Road. Catrine Clay, a television documentary director, spent hundreds of hours talking to Trautmann, still pin-sharp at 86, but has written it her way. Only a fifth of the pages deal with Trautmann's football career, provoking some to wonder whether it can rightfully be called a sports book at all. But that's another argument.

No controversy about the two books which complete the shortlist. Bounce (Fourth Estate, £12.99), is a fizzing, eye-opening analysis of how champions are made, brilliantly distilled from mountains of research by Matthew Syed, a former Commonwealth table-tennis champion and Olympian himself. And Duncan Hamilton, a winner in 2007 and again last year, is aiming to complete his hat-trick with A Last English Summer (Quercus, £20), an elegiac assessment of the state of the English cricketing nation after a season spent tramping the length and breadth of the country.

For my money, Blood Knots deserves to triumph for its originality, emotional power and superb writing. Although in a strong year, it's probably best not to bet on the Bookie.

To read longer extracts from all the books on the shortlist for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and to be in with a chance of winning a set of copies, visit http://ind.pn/WillHill

The extract

Blood Knots, By Luke Jennings (Atlantic £16.99)

'...Take nocturnal possession of 50 feet of canal, tackle up for pike and sooner or later – not on your first visit, perhaps, or your second, but eventually – it will happen. The line will start to trickle, inch by cautious inch, from your reel... and as you feel the line creep over the back of your hand, a kind of dread will rise through your body. Somewhere out there, deep down, something is moving. You sweep up the rod and strike, there's a hard, angry swirl, and you're connected. Not to a fish, at that moment, but to something much less resolved. To nature itself... You feel an icy vacuum expanding inside you. And then, with a fierce thrill, you see the fish in the torchlight – the long flank and jaw, the cold flash of the eye, the furious working of the fins – and what follows is the physical business of landing it. There's satisfaction in these later stages, of course, but it's those first heart-in-mouth seconds that you keep going back for. For the moment when anything is possible. When it might not be a fish at all'