For Whom The Ball Rolls

Following on beautifully from last week’s less than stable football supporter, I give you Alf Wangerman.
An ostensible fan of Welfare club football, he happens to be one of my favourite characters in football fiction. A solid, hob-nail booted, cigarette-rolling, donkey jacket-wearing abuser of referees.

The mission he chose to accept in Ian Plenderleith’s short story, Furlington Welfare’s Last Great Orator is to keep out of order Ref’s in order. The ordinary ones too when it comes to it. That’s all he does. He’s no interest in the football, the people around him or the result. His scorn, a singular, unrepeated, often unrepeatable, unrepentant stream of vitriolic verbosity, is plentifully poured all over the men in black. He attends games just to carry out these incessant attacks and gains some minor celebrity until… well, you can read it for yourself.

Scottish football refs have been joined by Irish Rugby Union refs in their acceptance of a Specsavers sponsorship. It’s a mark of their sense of humour and how they’ve taken the stick from the terraces in good grace. Under Alf’s avalanche they all crumble. Like some great Lincolnshire Viking, he sets the boat on fire before he pushes it out. It’s calamitous. Messy even. And brilliantly funny. But there’s a touch of sadness in it too. Sadness for the loss of what going to the game was like before corporatised, channel-hopping mercernary conglomerate football overwhelmed us. It reminded me of Pointless Jeff Connor’s spectacular non-fiction season with the completely unspectacular East Stirlingshire, the worst team in Scotland.

Another quality story in Plenderleith’s collection is The Man in the Mascot. A washed up alcy actor spends his Saturday afternoons inside the bird suit mascot of his local team and his Saturday nights willing his doomed relationship to change or fall apart. The girl, a slick marketing exec looking for a bit of rough or at least handing out a sympathy shag, seems just as ambivalent. A study of the morose, the bleak and the darkly (like night time in the middle of a Norwegian winter) funny, it’s another standout.

I’m also not the first to use Plenderleth’s work in the academic arena. A German Masters student used it in her thesis and translated the chapter about this story - have a look.

In For Whom the Ball Rolls there are many other stories which catch the eye. We almost tenderly take in the wife of an ex-player who cannot move past his miss in the cup final. Save of the Day (in a Small Scottish Village in 1974) feels like a tale from Plenderleith’s childhood. Importantly, it could so easily have been from my own. The Right Result and The Day FIFA came to Lincolnshire have a don’t-let-the-bastards-grind-you-down ebullience which makes them hard to forget. They’re classic boy’s own (and just a bit more grown up) football stories. Like many of the stories in the collection, they woo the pants off the ghost of football past.

Unlike Greg Furt-Trevis, the ex-player in the story the book takes its title from, we are not doomed to watch the same thing over and over. Nick Hornby’s wrong when he says all the drama we need is contained in the actual game. These stories, the ones we read in novels and collections as opposed to the ones we read in autobiographies and newspapers are worthy of our attention. For Whom the Ball Rolls proves it. It could be argued that the inclusion of non-football short stories shows these works can stand alongside their more generic counterparts.

It’s a great collection, it might be a few years old now, but it’s still relevant, it’s still fresh and most important, it’s very entertaining. Are you looking for anything else in your football fiction?

You can buy the book on Plenderleith's site.

Ian Plenderleith talks football fiction...

A handful of years ago Ian Plenderleith wrote a bagful of football fiction short stories. Some of them are very, very good, but the exquisitely titled For Whom The Balls Rolls will be reviewed soon enough.

Plenderleith clearly knows something about writing football. Mind you, he's been doing it for years, in places like The Guardian and When Saturday Comes and more recently in the US where he now resides. He was happy to answer a couple of questions for us. Happy enough that he may even answer a few more, so eh, like they say, watch this space.

thesimplestgame: we’ve read you made a calculated move to write about football because that’s what your publisher was looking for, but there must be something beyond that (you’ve written about football as a journalist for years). What is it about football that appeals to you as an author?

Ian Plenderleith: It wasn’t quite as calculated as that. I wrote to a publisher that had put out a compilation volume of short stories (‘A Game Of Two Halves’), which I thought were pretty average bar one or two. So I sent them three stories on the off-chance they were planning a second volume.
It was calculating in the sense that I thought, as an unknown writer, there would be no chance of having a volume of short stories published without a theme running through them. And as football books were extremely popular with most publishers in the late 90s, I thought football was as good a theme as any, given that it was an area I knew well. Also, somewhat naively, I thought that the shortage of good football fiction meant there was a literary gap in the market waiting to be filled.
But once I started thinking about football as theme for fiction, the ideas came. Almost every time I went to a game, or played in game, I had a basic idea I thought could be turned into a story. It could be something as fleeting as the expression on a player’s face, and my interpretation of that expression, that would lead to a story. Or a quip or a heckle from a fan.

tsg: Did you think then (or do you still think) there’s a defined market for football fiction?

IP: At the time the book was published I idealistically hoped, as all first-time authors do, that my book would define a new market! Now I think that if there is a market for adult football fiction (there’s always been a market for Boy’s Own football fiction aimed at the under 12s), it’s a very small one. Part of the problem for my book was that the publisher put virtually no resources nothing into marketing it. I was told that marketing budgets were only for already established authors. It’s apparently too big a risk to market a new writer, because they might not sell, but market an already famous name, and you’re guaranteed a certain number of sales. Cold hard business practice! Which needless to say quickly shattered my illusion that publishing houses are stacked with people who love and care about good literature (my editor is one of a number of editors, I should add, who nobly fight their corner for good writing).

tsg: Your fictional work is very engaging and the 'lonely luckless' characters are so well drawn, you put the reader right beside or inside them. How do you think you are able to do this?

IP:I didn’t really notice that a lot of my characters come across as lonely until a friend pointed it out. It wasn’t something I consciously set out to do. It helps, of course, if you’ve had phases of your life when you’ve been lonely, and can empathise with the world view that for the majority of people, bad luck outweighs the good, and that a stoical acceptance of that fact will help you endure and even thrive. I don’t think loneliness is any kind of affliction, just a state that of mind can hit us all at any time, like any other mood.
I’m flattered that you think the characters are well drawn, and I’m not sure how I’ve achieved that. Years of reading fiction, perhaps, and an awareness that all people are multi-dimensional characters. Even the ones we think we despise.


tsg: There seems to be a general belief that men prefer reading non-fiction over fiction -- it’s been put forward as one of the reasons for the dearth of football fiction. Another theory is that footballers are better at expressing themselves with a ball than a pen, why do you think there is so little fiction about a sport which is so popular?

IP: I think that belief is put out by publishers’ marketing departments. I wrote a (non-football) novel set here in the U.S. that was about a (non-sexual) male friendship, and my agent was told repeatedly by publishers that it was well written but wouldn’t sell “because there’s no market for male fiction.” That’s a crudely ignorant and insulting assessment to any male who reads fiction (not to mention a blow for my chances of ever getting a book published again), and an example of the narrow, myopic attitude that aims the majority of fiction at middle-aged women readers in the Book Club Belt (who might themselves not be averse to reading “male fiction.” Whatever that is).
As for the lack of football fiction in general, I think that’s partly down to the way that sport is used in fiction, either in books or films. The majority of it follows the formula that works towards a final scene where the hero scores the winning goal in the cup final, having no doubt overcome a number of standard obstacles on the way. So it’s a lack of imagination on the part of writers and the publishers who think that’s what the reader wants. But then again, maybe that is what the readers wants. It’s hardly as though the sales of my book suggest otherwise!
I do think, however, that good writing about sport avoids action on the field of play as much as possible.

This avoidance of the sports action on the pitch is worth a blog on its own. Its also one of the things thesimplestgame wants to discuss a little further with Ian Plenderleith. In the meantime, we'd like to thank him for his time, his help, his epic answers and for patience he will have to show in our future pestering of him.

Buy the book at Ian's site. It's definitely worth a look.