On the opening pages of Sacrifice, Oisín Murphy’s blunt and engaging new book, he introduces himself with a series of advisories. Not as a champion jockey or as one of the best riders in Europe but as a “deeply flawed young man” in ceaseless conflict with himself. It is immediately clear that this will not be a story about redemption or tidy resolutions, or happy endings, sport’s stock-in-trade.

At the beginning, for full disclosure, he mentions the serious infringements and suspensions that blew a crater in his career three years ago and the “self-destruct button” that is “omnipresent and varies in size depending on how I’m feeling inside”. The first reference to his “addiction to alcohol” and “the destruction that caused” appears on page three. On this window there are no curtains.

“A few people who have read it already said ‘it’s incredible how negative you are’,” he says in conversation. “But that is the way it is, unfortunately.”

The framework for the book is a diary of the 2024 season, when he won the Flat jockey’s championship in Britain for the fourth time. Murphy says he rejected the first approach from Penguin but was eventually persuaded by the structure they proposed. He could see some good in it.

“When they said it’s just on 2024 I almost felt it would be therapeutic because I could vent and voice my dissatisfaction to paper,” he says. “If Penguin didn’t think it was worth publishing then so be it, but it wasn’t going to hurt me by sending voice notes [to James Hogg, the ghostwriter] every day.

“Although he was understanding that I was not in great form every day, and very busy,