Changes are afoot...

I have mentioned in passing that things might be changing around the simplest game offices... and then, of course, there were a few erratic posts and it looked like I just couldn't shake it. But things, new things really are afoot

In the next few weeks the changes will become permanent and the new blog will be rolling like a solid pass down the touchline.
The simplest game blog will be housed under the simplest game banner, but things will be changing a bit. The content will still contain the tom foolery and the football fiction shenanigans, but it will now be run alongside a blog under my own name.Yes, thesimplestgame has been stripped of its anonymity, among other things.

It's still very much in development but the new site is running. Have a look anyway...the (new) simplest game.

too old for football?

Thesimplestgame is couch bound. Ripped a hole in the middle of a calf. Its no bovine injury, the back of the lower left leg feels like it has a bullet wound.

“Too old for football,” the wife laughed. Apparently there’s a cut off. When do we get too old for football? Isn’t it what keeps us young? The ranting at the telly, the boyhood obsession. The love of football was there before the wife was thought of. Yes, churlishness is a possibility.

She laughed even harder. She knows football is important, I'd go as far as to say she knows its really important, but there’s only a little recognition of a deeper understanding. It’s only a game, she used to say.

I know, that’s what I thought. She knows better now. She’s happy with a win and regrettably sympathetic if there’s not. That, my friends, is all a football fan need ask for in a non-footballing partner. Just ask Nick Hornby.

I’m taking part in the QWC AWonline writer’s race tonight. It’s the reason I’m blogging here now. A warm up. A wee stretch before the exertions. And yes, both were done preceding the sustained the footballing injury (I was the only one who did!).

Here’s the link - AWonline. It’ll be a laugh. AWonline has some brilliant resources attached. Well worth having a look at.

Changes in these blogging patterns are still afoot, or there are issues in squad development, something like that. thesimplestgame promises, if nothing else, to keep ye posted.

Incidentally, the painting is called Middle-Aged Men Playing Football by David Fawcett. You can look at and even purchase his very nice paintings here, if you're interested.

Apologies

Thesimplestgame is currently working on some rather dramatic (for us anyway) changes in format. I know. Sounds really exciting. It's not really.

We can only apologies for the somewhat prolonged, or, you could say, slightly frozen, service of late and assure you that issues of intermittency will be resolved as soon as poss. The new changes will be rolled out when they're done. It might take some time though, so please bear with us. We might even do something about the pishy patter.

Have ye got a pair of boots?

The first paid football players were Scottish. They emerged out of the mists on the rain soaked border to show the English how it was done. I like that. I like it a lot. It might reinforce myths concerning the Scot’s financial shrewdness, maybe not those working for the Bank of Scotland right enough, but I like to think it was because they were so skilled or at least skilled enough to warrant payment. I’m not ruling out the combination option, but the point stands – at least once in the history of the beautiful game, the Scots were considered to be very good, maybe even the best.

Since then, before you say it… things have changed a little. A helluva lot, actually. Yes, sadly it seems we’ve been getting progressively worse since those glorious halcyon days. The lowest point, worse than Ally McLeod’s late 70s combover and nationwide humiliation, came under the stewardship of a horrible wee German - no the other one - Berti Vogts. He steered us into some serious trouble. Enough to arouse suspicions about his real motives.

Even before that though, things had taken a turn for the worst. The stalwarts all retired, Goram gave up gambling and didn’t need the cash, Wee Baz wouldn’t play with Lambie and cheeky chappy Coisty got too heavy to lace his own boots. We’d also unhappily started on the Jackie Charlton management plan. Surprisingly, handing a pair of badly polished Umbro boots to any player who’d been near a plate o’ haggis, tatties ’n neeps, an empty Irn Bru bottle or had been seen waiting outside their local chip shop for a battered mars bar supper, is still proving to be as stable a proposition as making an investment in a US bank.

Recruitment aside, our world ranking unceremoniously dropped to 254th. One place above Burkina Faso. It prompted a Scottish national daily newspaper to pose the following question…

What’s the difference between Scotland and Burkina Faso? One’s a football backwater the other is a small country in Africa.

Now obviously thesimplestgame don’t want to be knocking an entire African nation or their footballing prowess. Professional players in Burkina get paid less than 30 pound a week apparently - less than it would cost to rap one of Wayne Rooney’s ears in brown paper. Burkina Faso is not a culturally impoverished country. It hosts one of the world’s most celebrated film festivals and, importantly, football is the favourite national pastime of the "men of integrity". Their poorly financed professional game is in 'development'. It’s not even 50 years old yet. It’s a different story for Scotland. To go from the very origins of professional football to not even being in the top 250 rankings was a blow even the most tartan spectacled fans couldn’t help making light of. Today, things are on the up, we were even in the world's top ten for a couple of weeks, yet we've failed to qualify for a major tournament in over a decade.

Now this is a site dedicated to football fiction, so it is with a mixture of pride and dismay that we discovered of the earliest examples of football fiction, including Tom Brown’s Days at Oxford in 1861 and PG Wodehouse’s Psmith and Mike in 1910, only Arnold Bennett’s The Card in 1911 features professional footballers, not much of a stretch considering the advent of the sport's professionalism only occurred a couple of years earlier. From an academic point of view this is what makes us happy. The dismay comes in that so few of the players in his work were Scottish (none - I think I need to check). Is it a legimate criticism to hold against the Yorkshireman? Some would say it is. Still we feel there’s a definitely place for his work on the football shelf before any of his pioneering peers.

football n fiction, ...they started walking out together.

Now I've talked about defining it. I've talked about the books. I've talked about the history of this lovely wee genre. I've even talked about how it works. Now it's about time I start putting it all together. It's going to take weeks. The progression will be fractured and distracted with all the usual nonsense - journal entries, updates on my PhD, spurious argument and obviously football books as I find them. [It's been beyond mental in thesimplestgame back office. It's nice to be back]

The first question I need to address is... Is football fiction really a genre?

Football fiction may have started with Shakespeare. In act one, scene four of King Lear (1606), the Earl of Kent kicks and taunts Oswald with the line, “Nor tripped neither, you base football player.” I have read too that there are references in The Comedy of Errors (1592). So, it's possible that football fiction has been around for longer than the modern version of the game, which developed some 260 years later. I doubt it though.

In Ray of the Rovers: the working class heroine in popular football fiction 1915-1925 Alethea Melling puts football fiction's roots in working-class “factory or dialect fiction”. But there are examples of football fictions existing before that. In The Encyclopedia of British Football, Cox and company do a good job of contextualising the history of 'football literature', but in following Alethea's lead, they spurn the chance to create a definition themselves.

The only other uses of the term football fiction I have encountered are for classification purposes on the East Sussex (England) public library website and on a gay erotic fan fiction site. I hope the two never get mixed up, the East Sussex WI's knickers' would be so twisted for so long, there would be tears in every brown eye.

In an attempt to broaden the field to include other forms of football writing (a practice I want to steer things away from), including non-fiction, plays, revues, photography collections and poetry, DJ Taylor, in Rally Round You Havens! and John Turnbull, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, in The Global Game have assigned the collective works of football writing the distinction of being soccer or football literature.

This was the definition I developed (in an earlier blog). It raised a couple of eyebrows during the auld confirmation process.

Any work of fiction with a significant reliance on football as a central or substantive element of the narrative.

It's still a little spongy. It'll need some reworking, particularly around what qualifies as significant or substantive, but what it does is offer a centre spot, somewhere to play from until the field firms up. Otherwise where would you start?

Do you include Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave (1969) for example? As John Turnbull pointed out on this site, it’s about a boy and his bird, but there is also a single, narratively ‘significant’, 20 page game (in a book of 159 pages). Do you include John King’s The Football Factory (1996) even though the reader rarely sees any actual football?

Albert Camus and the boy Nabakov have both written about football - particularly their own experiences as players, (see the Global Game site, its full of great stuff like this), should I consider their work? The Plague (1970) is full of football references, well not full, but it is mentioned a number of times.

I would say no to Shakespeare on the grounds of historical perspective. King’s trilogy The Football Factory , Head Hunters (1997) and England Away (1998), works of stunning violence and football hooliganism, are saturated in the parlance of football culture and are assuredly first eleven. Barry Hines makes the subs bench as Billy Casper, the wee boy in A Kestrel for a Knave, is colourfully and clearly developing as a character in the scene that, more importantly, is a sustained description of a football game. As for Camus and Nabakov, I’m not so sure.

This all seems well and good, except people have been making stuff up about football since football began; in skewed match reports, transfer speculation filled newspapers, websites and ‘pub-storytellers’ recounting great events. If you counted everyone who’d allegedly attended Scotland’s defeat of England, then reigning World Champions, in 1967 in Glasgow, the stadium would have been filled at least three times over.

It'll do though. More next week.

Detached from the world…still chasing the ball

thesimplestgame must apologise to regular readers for the less than regular service here over the last couple of weeks. My life has been given a fairly hefty doing by the PhD confirmation process. I’ve now completed and submitted the document. I can honestly say that the 140 page academic ‘tour de force’ was one of the most difficult tasks I have ever undertaken and I still have the presentation and the gruelling 5 person panel interview/review to do.

Such an intense period of thought, research and study has left my battered, bruised and bloodied brain feeling like it’s been sitting on a hot plate for the last six weeks, or in a bain-marie. Either way it’s kind of soft, hot and sweaty. A less than nutritious goo has been beading my ears since last thursday.

Every time I’ve sat down to knock over the latest spraff on football fiction the front heated window of my mind steams over and I can’t get started. It’s the reason for the delay in posting this week. It’s not a block of writerliness as such. It’s simply a matter of unravelment. Like an auld woolly jumper on a washing line in the rain, my brain feels like it's come apart in fairly substantial sections. The re-enravelment process is not happening as quickly as I had hoped. As you can see from this here word deposit, it’s still too difficult to concentrate for long enough to throw a couple of lines together.

My thesis is about football fiction. Specifically the differences between young adult and adult works. To do this I’ve graphed and historicised the sociology of fictional football writing. It’s been really interesting. I’ve blended work from people we’ve seen on this site, such as DJ Taylor and John Turbull with work by cultured theorists like Steve Redhead, Alethea Melling and the writers of the Encyclopedia of British football. I’ve also come up with some of my own ideas on the genre – which is the way of things I suppose.

I’ve broken the genre down – because I can say with some authority that it is a genre – into streams and movements, which I will discuss when I’m feeling a little more attached to the world.

the Global Game meets the simplest game part 3

This is the final part of John Tunbull's interview for thesimplestgame, but I am absolutely positive that this will not be the last time his words will appear on this site. John Turnbull, editor of the glorious collection of football writing The Global Game, is the guru of football writing. I've just read one of his papers about football journalism and I've got to tell you, the guy really knows his gear. But I'll get to that in the next couple of weeks. The book is a remarkable piece of work. I'll be reviewing it soon too. These are the rest of John's answers...

thesimplestgame: What about football appeals to you as a writer and reader?
John Turnbull: Football contains the world. I cannot imagine an aspect of human experience – faith, fellowship, politics, language, law, love, resistance – that could not be addressed by considering the football ground. It is probably the most subtext-heavy sport on the planet. For a writer with interests in theology and international affairs and cross-cultural study and language, football offers all these ingredients.

My interest in football as a reader really began with Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow – a beautiful title, especially in the original Spanish, El fútbol a sol y sombra. After referring to the “astonishing void” in academic histories of the region, Galeano demonstrates how football bears much in Latin American society and culture. His is not a rhapsodic, nostalgic treatment. He is critical of the sport as spectacle that, in the modern day, is “organized not for play but rather to impede it.” That the best football writing might accommodate such perspectives of melancholy and loss – the game’s shadow side – is a strength.

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?

JT: The problem with the statement is the assumption that only men would be interested in football fiction. I suppose it is an explainable bias. Decisions about football books in English, to a large extent, come from publishing houses and agents in London. And as Steven Wells says, “From the British perspective, football is a measure of masculinity. It’s actually more important than possessing a penis.” Therefore, from commissioning editors lacking in imagination, with pounds sterling and the euro as the only frames of reference, we get fed a diet of hooligan memoirs (aka “hoolie porn”) and ghosted biography.

There might be some parallel in fiction to Galeano’s observation concerning the absence of sport from academic histories. Football exists in a nether region between intellect and emotion, aesthetic and kitsch. On the one hand, many writers and intellectuals see the game as too common to inspire higher sentiments; at the same time, our stereotypical image of sports fans is that they do not respond to appeals to the mind and reason. Yet clubs in the UK such as Tottenham, Barnsley and Brighton and Hove Albion have or have had poets in residence. Why not novelists in residence? Or philosophers in residence?

Jorge Valdano alone would disprove the thesis that footballers are incapable of narrating their own experience. I imagine that talented writers are no more or less common among footballers than in the rest of the population. It is open to question whether non-English-speaking footballers receive better educations or are more broad-minded than counterparts in the UK, USA, Australia and so on. From Australia, for example, the late Johnny Warren has written eloquently on football’s capacity to transcend cultural and ethnic divides.

But Alexei Smertin, a Russian player with experience at Chelsea, Portsmouth and Charlton, mentions to Marc Bennetts in Football Dynamo the challenges of learning English when “surrounded by guys whose vocabulary is limited to ‘fuck,’ and who make mistakes with grammatical tenses. ... I found it quite hard to communicate with English people in a non-football environment.” Bennetts has also quizzed Russian footballers on their favorite books. One popular selection is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Smertin also likes Nabokov and Balzac.

tsg: Do you think there is a defined market for football literature, particularly fiction?
JT: The answer depends on the market that one considers. Certainly one would have better success pitching a football novel in Barcelona than New York. Having said that, I am aware of several novels in the United States on the “soccer mom” theme – bodice rippers about women whose overcharged libidos stray far from the touchlines.

John Turnbull's interview has been something of an enlightenment. An education in football writing. thesimplestgame is very, very grateful. We would like to thank John for his help, his time, his generosity and his patience. Thanks John.

You can have a look at excerts from John, Thom and Alon's book or even buy it at The Global Game The site really is worth a look.

The Global Game meets the simplest game part 1

John Turnbull is the editor of a colourful, often beautiful and equally riotous, truly international, collection of football writing called The Global Game. What I’ve read of it is fantastic. When I’m done I will certainly include a review here. John and his friends in football, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, have done something that's a little special. Ye see, for the first time, that I know of anyway, someone has taken the time to seek out and translate football writing from around the world and put it in the one place. It's like a sampler, only smarter. With something to read from, and an introduction to, each author. It's an education, that's entertaining. And that's the way we like it here at thesimplestgame.

They aren’t all fiction. Some are just straight out quality football writing. There’s work in there by the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, Gunter Grass, Simon Kuper, Ian Jack, Ted Hughes and Elvis Costello. There’s a whole lot more. Writers from all over the world. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be looking at the book in much closer detail as well as adding some of the answers John Turnbull gave me when thesimplestgame approached him to discuss his work.

The sites are well worth looking at too. Here’s a link to The Global Game - soccer writers site.You can buy the book there too.

Thesimplestgame really like the site, what motivated you and your colleagues to kick it off?

John Turnbull: Certainly there is a promotional aspect to the Web-based material, but, speaking for myself, I wanted to use interactive tools and especially podcasting to reduce the artificial separation between anthology editors and contributors. We are lucky to live in a time when such connections can be made with relative ease. Given that it was our intent in the book to draw on material from cultures and languages unfamiliar to Americans, it was inevitable that we would include selections from writers that we, as an isolated country, had never heard of before.

For example, within the book and via Internet telephony - in a podcast on the Writers on Soccer microsite - we have the chance to hear from Elísabet Jökulsdottír of Reykjavík comparing the mystery of football to the mystery of the ocean. After our conversation, she said that she had never spoken before with an interviewer from North America. That her name and her work might reach a broader audience alone is one reason for the book and accompanying Web site.
I also spoke to Uroš Zupan of Slovenia. It would be an oversimplification to say that his prose makes him the Nick Hornby of Central Europe, but he does cite Fever Pitch as at least partial inspiration for essays on overlapping recollections of World Cup tournaments and of his upbringing in the former Yugoslavia. I was able to speak with him about his 2007 book, Textbook Panini, and how he grades both teams and players via a private set of aesthetic criteria. Interesting that, for Hornby, Arsenal Football Club to some extent
shaped his identity as well as his attitude to the wider world. Zupan, in contrast, samples from the menu on offer without prejudice as to nationalities, perhaps a trait acquired from having lived in a culture of restrictions. But, more likely, he is probably just curious.

There’s a whole lot more to come from John Turnbull - too much for one blog. Thesimplestgame are very grateful to John for his generosity and his time and look forward to many more electronic conversations with a man who, it has to be said, really knows his football writing. We're also grateful for the opportunity to put Elvis Costello and Gunter Grass in the same blog.

Queensland's Women Roar

thesimplestgame has a remarkable interview to post. David Taylor, author of English Settlement, was generous enough to answer some questions so we’ve been looking forward to posting it.

And I will, soon enough.

Not today though. Today, its hats off to the Queensland Roar’s W-League team who followed their minor premiership win by taking out the grand final on Saturday.

The game itself wasn’t a great spectacle. Two good goals inside the first 25 minutes wrapped it up for Queensland. Canberra United never recovered. The event though, the winning of the inaugural league in front of over 5,000 paying fans, is something to consider. If a women’s league final can generate this much interest the game is clearly gathering strength and position in this country.

A-League fans would tell you that it’s been happening for a few years already. Their detractors, and there are still a lot more of them, would have you believe otherwise. For thesimplestgame, avid supporters of the W-League and our local team, a noisy women’s final is surely all the evidence that’s needed.

My wee lassie’s first trip to a big game was the story for the day. It’s hardly news right enough and she’s been in a stadium before, a glorious stadium, but she was too young to that remember now. She’s a sturdy, ‘grown-up’ (her words not mine) six year old.

One hot dog and 20 minutes of concern over the food wrappers being blown onto the pitch later, she’d missed the first goal. She was elated to have caught the second, and cheered along with the rest of us. I spent the remainder of the half explaining as much of the football as I could. Like any dutiful daughter she listened politely. She even exhibited some signs of interest.

Half time refreshments called for a run up and down steep stairs and a trip to the merchandise van, despite the Aladdin’s cave of orange attire on offer, all she wanted was a flag. So we got one. She waved the living shit out of it for the first 15 minutes of the second half. We stayed away from seated punters so she could do so with a reasonable amount of freedom. I then managed to get her back to our seats, but not before we’d tried higher in the stand and then lower, before settling back to the midway point. We sat in front of the wall at the bottom of the tier. She could not see the pitch and spent the duration of the game standing on my knees shouting as loud as her wee voice would allow.

With only a few minutes left we decided to start making our way to an exit. Thankfully she missed the streaker, if only because my explanation of that incident would have generated slightly more confusion than the offside rule.

Most importantly she wants to go again. She wants to go as soon as the season starts. I’ve not pushed her. Yes the game was my idea and the onus was on me to entertain but the Queensland Roar women’s team helped me out, enough to see her want to return.

It goes without saying that the more popular the game is, interest in football fiction will follow suit.

Could it really all have kicked off with King Lear?

Football fiction has turned out to be a tricky little vixen. I’ve had a great deal of difficulty in tracking stuff down, but now I’m starting to get places. Thanks in part to the Encyclopedia of British Football written by Richard William Cox, Dave Russell, Wray Vamplew and the National Football Museum.

I’m looking at scoping the history of the genre. The where-it-all-began. It’s hardly a journey back through the mists of time, but it spans the best part of a hundred years. So long as you don’t count Shakespeare. But I’ll get to that.

It didn’t start with Sydney Horler either, but among the 150 or so books he wrote, Horler penned a spree of almost romanticised football fiction (about 20 of the blighters) like Life’s a Game about spy footballers and all sorts. Along with works by Arnold Bennet and JB Priestley, they were published around the 1920’s right up until the 50’s.

A new favourite author of mine, Robin Jenkins, wrote The Thistle and the Grail in 1954 and little seemed to come afterwards until the mid to late 60’s when Barry Hines knocked out A Kestrel For A Knave (1968) a cold, hardbitten northern English story. Hunter Davies published the notorious Striker in the late 70’s and the story of Sinderby Wanderers was published a couple of years before it. Reviews of some of these titles will follow in the coming weeks.

Things picked up in the 80’s and 90’s when the likes of Roddy Doyle (the Van), DJ Taylor (English Settlement), Julian Barnes and Martin Amis, among others, wrote about or made reference to football in their work and, wittingly or not, established or imposed something of a literary level on the genre. No doubt, the nobility of the Italian World Cup, with its Nessun Dorma’d operatic theme contributing, the low brow gained some height before the likes of Irvine Welsh (Marabou Stork Nightmares, the Acid House) and John King (The Football Factory, Head Hunters and England Away) brought it back to earth with a lager-fuelled, hard-edged come-down and a solid terrace-style beating.

Since then there have been a number of other standouts, peers and undeserving derivatives of those mentioned, as well as a few which found themselves out of play for one reason or another. More recently David Peace lifted football fiction out of the doldrums with The Damned United. (I've reviewed it already)

There’s more to this in my PhD. Things are filling out. But my main concern will be in identifying trends, peaks and troughs, hits and misses and the anomalies, the oddities, the plain old plums and the triumphs.

Importantly I’m searching for the exact place it all started. There’s been speculative news reports and comic strips and a host of other stuff too including fiction books for kids of all shapes and sizes since the dawn of the era. I would imagine people have been telling football tales, tall and true, since the first ball was kicked. There’s even mention of a “football player” in King Lear, which could mean that Shakespeare wrote the first football fiction.

As much as I doubt it, from my studies point of view, I think it might be very cool if he did.

probably the pishest part of a PhD

I would’ve liked to have started the new year with a cheeky wee book review. A nice easy opportunity for diatribe. When I say that I mean wholly objective critical examination obviously. But I’ve not the time to read or even examine said reading.

I am currently embroiled in writing the confirmation paper for my PhD. You could say up to my alabaster scottish neck in it. (Aye, alabaster - I’ve not been out of the dark wee room for days).

It requires a great deal of thought, hard work, perspiration (I know. That’s exactly what I said. Nobody tells you about that bit) and, if I’m honest, gluttonous persistence – read: sitting in a dark wee room trying to write like an academic till you’re so far past the point of boredom, it’s back on the horizon because you’re about to Lance Armstrong lap it.

And I don’t mean lap it up. This is the penance for accepting a scholarship, the part where they get their money’s worth.

I tell you all this not for sympathy – my old man used to say sympathy comes between shit and syphilis in the dictionary. I tell you because the process requires a 'real life' definition. In the throes of understanding the parameters of the cosy little niche I’m attempting to carve for myself, I need to determine, beyond it being the umbrella that shades my blog, what football fiction is exactly.

Any definition would have to be simple because, let’s face it, I’m no really that clever. It would have to straight forward enough to withstand scrutiny of the definition police in attendance at my confirmation, and it will requires a great deal of flexibility or be hard enough to take the beating it'll need to fit into or, at least, get strapped onto my thesis.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Any story with any degree of makey-uppy football in it.

There, simple, straight forward, hard and flexible. I went through all my posts to see if there were any I rejected on the strength of some spurious criteria but I’ve either been extremely discerning in my choices up to this point, too embracing read lenient or I haven’t developed stringent enough criteria. I can’t write that in my PhD though. I could try, but I’m pretty confident it won’t help my cause. It’ll have to be something more like…

Any work of fiction with a genuine and significant reliance on football as a central or substantive element of the narrative.

In the unlikely event that you feel a twinge of sympathy, a sense of altruistic good (bloglike) neighbourliness, or even the need to pour hot saucy scorn over the happy sandwich filler I've managed to process so far, please feel free to do so. Smashin'. Thanks.