bitterness and reticence and biographic nonsense

The leg’s better, much better, thanks. The bullet wound is healing painfully slowly, as is the way with someone in the early autumnal stages of life, so the wife (still laughing) assures me. Still no football though. Or running. It’s a bit rubbish.

And the football season’s finished.

Thesimplestgame would like to reticently and bitterly offer a heartless congratulations to the debt-ridden conglomerations who triumphed. Well-done’s must go to both Chelsea and Man (and boy) United.

Though on reflection, there is no need for bitterness or reticence. These clubs actually need our help. Yes, our help. Both squads will need large and exceptionally absorbent towels to dry their eyes after their respective puerile remonstrations and humiliating demonstrations of footballing impoverishment in the Champions League. Winning the Premiership or the vainglorious FA Cup cannot remove the images of forever-tarnished, fat and teary, petted-lips from our collective minds. It only makes their plight, a plight no football fan can afford or ignore.

So here’s thesimplestgame’s end of season charity plea: If anybody out there has a spare £750 million, could you help either of these dispassionate and unemboldened clubs, who, despite having the most expensive and roundly celebrated footballers on the planet, were unable to carry themselves with even a modicum of the decorum expected of professionals in other walks of life.

Maybe I’m bitter because I’d just got myself fit enough to play for the first time in years – a series of bulldozer throwing injuries had kept me from playing the beautiful game in my characteristically horrible and uncouth fashion for almost six years - and I find myself sidelined again. Maybe I’m bitter because the teams I follow lack the strength to carry the weight of these 'giant' clubs' debt-accumulating prowess. Maybe I’m just sick of watching pampered, excessively-paid, over-rated adult footballers kick-off like kindy kids. Maybe I'm just bitter.

Man (and boy) United Striker, Wayne Rooney, at 20 years old, agreed a 12-year contract with HarperCollins to write, that’s right, write a minimum of five books for an advance of £5m plus royalties.(He really is holding a Harry Potter book in his right hand.) If you were ever wondering where the boundaries of football fiction and non-fiction blurred together, thesimplestgame suspects that there would be a good place to start looking.

thick herberts - DJ Taylor on Football Fiction

DJ Taylor is a critic, novelist, biographer and most recent hero of thesimplestgame. He received the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award for his work on George Orwell and contributes to The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman and The Spectator among others. Importantly he’s published a football fiction novel called English Settlement(1996), a non-fiction work called On The Corinthian Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism In Sport(2006) which is ‘mostly’ about football and penned a rather significant essay about football fiction. Like I say, he’s made a heroic contribution to my PhD without even realizing it. (thanks David). He was even good enough to answer a few questions.

tsg: The Encyclopedia of British Football notes your observation on what it calls ‘the predicament of football writing’. Apparently serious writers avoid the topic of football literature (fiction anyway) because of the often patronising or negative response given to books that try to reverse the trend. Did you know they’d mentioned you? Did you really make such a statement? And could you elaborate on what you meant?

David Taylor: I didn't know about the reference in the Encyclopaedia. I think it refers to an essay I wrote in a short-lived (but very good) book-length soccer biannual called Perfect Pitch (four issues, 1997-8) published in the UK by Headline Review. (tsg will be discussing the essay soon) The piece appeared in the first number (1997) and is called '"Rally round you Havens!": Soccer and the Literary Imagination' and the quote, about why it's so difficult to write convincingly about football, runs:
"Another drawback might be the characteristic inarticulacy of the game's participants, which in fictional terms is the eternal problem of equating the sensibility of the artefact with that of the characters the author has chosen to populate it. Perhaps in the last report this is just a way of saying that novels about soccer tend to be written by educated gentlefolks who have observed the game from afar while the cast of such works will necessarily be thick herberts, and that a certain amount of patronage, or rather distance between writer and raw material, inevitable."

tsg: What motivated you to write English Settlement? Was it a response to your observations about the market?
DT: I wanted to write a satirical state of the nation novel about England in around 1990 and I thought football was a wonderfully symbolic arena to set it in. Also a good background for the plot - an accountant friend once explained that there's no better place to launder money than a big soccer club.

tsg: Ian Plenderleith said good writing about sport avoids action on the field of play as much as possible. Nick Hornby said there's enough drama in football as it is without people needing to make up stories about it. Do you agree with either of them?
DT: Plenderleith not necessarily (see a brilliant novel which is, inter alia, about soccer called From Scenes Like These (1969) by Gordon Williams). Hornby - no with emphasis. There are no off-limits for novelists.

tsg: One of English Settlement’s real strengths lies in how much it allows you to say about England at that time (Thatcher out, Major in). The football seems to provide a window to look at the country. Was this a deliberate ploy? Was it because there were things you had to say? Or did you find that the football wasn’t enough on its own?
DT: If I could boringly quote from the essay mentioned in 1:
“On the face of it, football...ought to provide a perfect subject for fiction. There are several reasons for this, but one of the more obvious is that it involves at least 22 people spending 90 minutes in the same place, leaving aside the pre- and post-match socialising. Another is the game's centrality (along with boxing, pop music and organised crime) to the whole notion of working-class self-advancement, a social phenomenon in which the twentieth-century English novel has occasionally shown some mild interest. Then there is the agreeable, if sometimes faintly insidious, way in which soccer can transform itself into a moral exercise - the rock-like defender humbled by the jinking imp, the non-League club that brings down the Premiership's finest, that whole motivational dynamic of doing one's best against insuperable odds. Finally, and in some ways uniting the previous explanations into a single point of focus, there is the fact that soccer is essentially a romantic activity.”

tsg: You’ve also written about The Corinthians. What do you think it is about football that appeals to you as an author?
DT: I think that this is more or less answered by my response to 2. This was just the time when money was coming into the game in huge amounts - Sky etc, first inklings of the Premiership. Although English Settlement is probably more nostalgic for the old megalomaniac chairman for whom the club is a kind of private fiefdom - Walham is based on the pre-Al-Fayed Fulham, whom I used to watch in the '80s.

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 that is so popular?
DT: see the essay again, which is a 20 page discussion of exactly this.

tsg: Do you think (or did you think when you wrote English Settlement that) there’s a defined market for football fiction?
DT: No and (probably) no. English Settlement was the least successful novel I've ever written (though, oddly, it was translated into Italian and won a prize there). I thought the 'literary' audience would take it as a novel, but they were puzzled by the football stuff. I think the football audience was puzzled by the literary stuff.

thesimplestgame would like to thank DJ Taylor for his time, efforts, answers and generosity. We’re particularly grateful for his contribution to the field - academic, non-fiction and literary. It’s about as good as it gets as far as my PhD is concerned.

Unfortunately English Settlement is out of print, but you can still get a copy if you’re lucky. We’ll review it here in the next couple of weeks. It’s worth a look.

Hornby, a lawyer n sex in the city?

At the weekend in the boozer, I was having a gas with a football fan. He was a lawyer, so obviously his opinion meant a great deal to him. He asked what I did and I told him about my PhD. Being the experienced litigator that he is, he knew about my quest to map the world’s football fiction in a matter of no time. I’m not sure what he thinks of the quest. You might need to invoke some kind antidote to the client confidentiality clause he keeps up his sleeve for his days at the coalface of human misery. He did however forthrightly give me his opinion on why there’s a shortage of football fiction.

He says its because every single story, every moment of drama, tension, mystery and … he used other words too, a lot of other words, but I was drunk, he was slavering - he’s a lawyer remember. Essentially, while he’d probably never admit to it, he agrees with Nick Hornby (see Fever Pitch) ) who said, “I've never particularly wanted to read a football novel. Like most football fans, I suspect, I wouldn't believe in a Melchester Rovers, nor in a player I'd never heard of. And I'm not sure what the POINT of such a book would be. Real-life sport already contains all the themes and narratives you could want.”
(see Full Hornby Penguin Q & A))

I don’t agree with either Hornby or the lawyer I think there are still loads, maybe millions, of stories, moments, results to discover and perspectives to be offered. There can never be enough football. There will never be enough football, especially well-written football. I do think Hornby and the lawyer have a point though. I think it’s more likely, as my friend big T pointed out, that disproportionate levels of football fiction is due more to the most contemporary of capitalist values, immediacy and consumability. And there’s the solace in forgetting what happened the week before. A devastating early exit from European competition for example, is something you’d want to put behind you as quickly as possible.

It takes time to read and digest a novel. If it’s good you never want to forget it. But regardless of how good it is, it offers very little to discuss with your mates in the pub. Unless your mates are the book club. Otherwise it’s kinda like great sex with the wife, husband, mistress, master or sister. No matter how good it is, you’re not going to be giving a stranger the details over a pint are you? Are you? I don’t know. I have to say the lawyer crossed my mind. And I did say kinda.

Like the most casual, frivolous, promiscuous sex, non-fiction football books offer real-life anecdotes, giggles and embellished tales to share openly. In fact I would say there’s a customary, if sometimes taciturn, one-up-(wo)manship in who can find the best, weirdest, most abstract and utterly scandalous to relay to the lads and ladies in the pub. A dirty, dressed down Sex In The City for football fans if you like. It’s easy to see why there’s so much more non-fiction football writing when it's put like that innit?

Even if he wouldn’t cough up for his share of the taxi, (miserable bastard!) I am grateful to the lawyer. It’s good to revisit the questions that started all this.

Jasper Zammit Vs. Sheilas, wogs & poofters

The late and undoubtedly great Johnny Warren was a force in playing football and in football media in Australia. A veritable ambassador for the game, he had a tendency to shine whenever football did and sometimes times even when it didn’t. On SBS Him ’n Les Murray were an awesome team-up as far as pundits go.

His autobiography Sheilas, wogs & poofters is a sometimes dry but no less interesting and often amusing unofficial history of Football in Australia.There’s the story of the 1974 World Cup campaign, doomed because the players ripped off a Witch Doctor in Rhodesia during qualification and the story of $13.74 cheque they got for playing something like 11 international games (and people call the Scot’s tight!). In 2004 John Saffran went to Zimbabwe, tracked down and straightened out the Witch Doctor with a tenner and, lo and behold, Australia qualified for the 2006 World Cup - first time since '74.

The controversially titled book -its what Warren was often told of the game in his playing days- is a must read for any discerning football fan in this country.

Less can be said about Jasper Zammit: Soccer Legend the young adult football fiction he hoiked his name to. That’s not to say that it’s badly written, the idea that the all-conquering goodness of football will always win out/save the day/ teach us a lesson is now as well worn as Johnny’s oldest pair of boots.

We could live with the story if the writing dazzled, but it’s a bit too vanilla and certainly not in the same league in terms of spark as the Megs Morrison series (see Here’s one for the kids blog 2 March 2008).

With the exception of Jasper, the cast of cardboard characters move through a paper thin story, while messages, the tips at the beginning of each chapter - ‘Rule #12 Stay relaxed and focused under pressure’ - hammer home Johnny’s sportsmanlike positively-minded, footballing philosophy.


It's all right for me, I've knocked it over in an hour, but if I was a kid I’d be bored of the lessons by the end.
There are a couple of requisite sequels. I haven’t read them, but I’m going to.

It’s still football fiction innit?

…Women were meant to play football…

I don't know about any of you, but women's football is sexy any way you look at it. A lot of sexy women play and pretty much any woman you don't need to use complex shopping analogies to explain the offside rule to definitely is.

The feminine qualities they bring to the game make it even more graceful, flowing and easy on the eye, not to mention the gilt-edged guile and cunning that comes with it. (Did you see the goal Brazil scored against the Matildas in last year's Women's World Cup Qtr Final tie? Quite honestly, one of the sexiest goals I've ever seen.)

While I may have offended people with the sweeping generalisations I urge you to read on. The book I'm talking about will change your mind...about a lot of things, not just me. It has impact - I'm probably just not showing it.

While it's certainly not a football fiction publication (this site's primary concern), it is a significant work about football and since the media-culture reviews asked me to review Jean William's wonderful book I thought this blog could live with one non-fiction review.

Here's what it says on the back of the book...
FIFA, the world governing body of association football, declared ‘The Future is Feminine’ in a 1995 press release. Since then, football has been claimed as the fastest growing participation sport for women globally. An estimated twenty million women play the game around the world, and that figure is on the rise. However, the history of women's participation goes back to at least 1895 and in our enthusiasm for the present, the memory of that longer history can be overlooked or forgotten. A Beautiful Game examines contemporary women’s football internationally, with case studies from England, the United States, China and Australia. In each case study, Jean Williams considers the evolution of the women’s game against a backdrop of issues, such as media representation, access to facilities, lack of resources, coaching, sponsorship, talent identification, training and professionalisation and contentious questions, such as women's absence from the highest levels of professional football, combining source material from archives, oral history and artefacts. A Beautiful Game analyses the status and image of the women’s game from the late nineteenth century to the shifting social values of the present.

The author Jean Williams (a Senior Research Fellow in Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, teaches the MA in the History and Culture of Sport and Leisure and the FIFA-sponsored International Masters in Management, Law and Humanities of Sport) is a bit of a boffin and must love her football - while the two things rarely occur in the same place (I'll get to philosophyfootball in a future blog) thesimplestgame thought'd it be worth a mention.

It's very good. Like very, very good, fascinating to be honest. Jean Williams has done her homework, and while at times it reads like a boffin wrote it, it always reads like it was a fan too. It's well worth a look.

A far longer, far more in-depth and comprehensive review will be posted on M/C Review very soon. It even gave me an opportunity to recall the famous line from Bill Forsyth's 1981 film "Gregory's Girl"...if women were meant to play football... ...read the review M/C Reviews

or buy the book at Footprint Books NSW