The first part of the story is told through a series of flashbacks when Frank is anaesthetised in a dentist's chair, having had his front teeth broken in a rugby league match, and recovering at a Christmas party.

Following a nightclub altercation, in which Frank takes on the captain of the local rugby league club and punches a couple of other players, he asks a scout for the team to help him get a tryout.

Although at first somewhat uncoordinated at the sport, he impresses Gerald Weaver, one of the team's owners, with the spirit and brutality of his playing style during the trial game.

His recently-widowed landlady, Mrs Margaret Hammond, a mother of two young children, rebuffs Frank's attempts to court her and treats him rudely and abrasively.

She lost her husband in an accident at Weaver's engraving firm, but received little financial compensation, because the death was suspected to be a suicide.

When he gets home after the party, Margaret agrees to share his bed to keep him warm, as he looks unwell with his swollen face and missing teeth, but, in her grief, she cannot really return his affection, saying she is scared to invest her feelings in one person, as they might go away or die.

Returning to Margaret's house and breaking in by the back door, Frank wanders through the empty space and calls out her name before collapsing in tears.

This Sporting Life was Anderson's first feature film as director, though he had made numerous short documentaries in the previous fifteen years, and even won an Oscar for 1954's Thursday's Children.

[citation needed] The riverside location where Frank takes Margaret and her family for an outing in his new car is Bolton Priory in the Yorkshire Dales.

It is a remarkable study of working class angst, with a cutting style like no other British feature before it, an ever-underrated achievement by Taylor.

[5]Another description of the editing says: From the start, Lindsay Anderson and his editor Peter Taylor show a determination to pursue a flashback-based narrative using bold-cut transitions.

[6]Anderson wrote in his diary on 23 April 1962, after the first month or so of production: "the most striking feature of it all, I suppose, has been the splendour and misery of my work and relationship with Richard".

[8] Variety praised the film's "gutsy vitality", as well as the production of Reisz and the directorial efforts of Anderson, who "brings the keen, observant eye of a documentary man to many vivid episodes without sacrificing the story line".

[2] Writing in 1980, John Russell Taylor thought it a mistake to link This Sporting Life with the "kitchen sink" films released in the preceding few years, because its "emotionalism" made it "unique", setting it apart from the earlier works: ...every scene in the film is charged with the passion of what is not said and done, as well as what is...Though real enough and believable enough, this kind of amour fou is remote indeed from what the staid middle class cinema would generally consider as realism.