'This isn't your typical footy book.'-Michael Rowland, ABC News Breakfast presenter A young, naive kid, with a brand-new football. Over time, the leather aged from the bumps along the trail. The Footscray winters and some glorious liniment-scented afternoons. All of the laughs, the scraps, the yarns and characters. The game. It all left a mark on me, on my soul. Bob Murphy has never been a typical footballer. Music buff, Age columnist and Winnebago driver, he is as comfortable in a quiet corner of a Fitzroy cafe or the front bar of a grungy pub as he is in the locker room. Murphy takes the reader inside his 17-year career, including his three years as captain of the Bulldogs, exploring the people, places and events that shaped him- from playing backyard cricket in 1980s Warragul to Community Cup with Paul Kelly in the 2000s, and from the joy of marrying his high-school crush to the agony of a season-ending ACL ruptures. How did the country kid with a gypsy's heart become an All-Australian captain? What's it like to have your club win the grand final for the first time in 62 years and have to cheer from the sidelines? How does it feel to realise you can no longer do the things that made you great? The celebrated Australian football bard Martin Flanagan has long insisted Bob Murphy has a book in him like no footballer has written. Leather Soul proves him right. 'We are indebted to him for making us believe in the game again.' -Gerard Whateley

This is the story of a boy called Bob. He's a little scrawny, a little scruffy, and he likes to sniff footballs (weird). But he has the game in his veins and he's determined to be one of the greats, like his hero from the mighty Tigers, Matthew Richardson. And he will be! But not without a few misadventures first ... His older brother and sister are the worst, he has a major crush on a girl who doesn't seem to notice him, and his footy oval at school is actually a rectangle and instead of grass, it's covered in gravel! But that's not going to stop him. Follow Bob as he gets drafted to the Western Bulldogs at seventeen, slogs his guts out at training with the big Dogs, and eventually becomes one of the greatest football captains ever.