popular pictures and women's football

Whether its prawns and bottled beer by the pool or a couple of pints and a whisky round the fire in the pub, it seems to be the time of year for reflection and family and watching loads of telly and eating too much and drinking more than is considered reasonable. It’s the holidays though and you should be good to yourself.

I gave a passing thought to joining the fray and posting one of those ‘the year that was’ posts, ye know, where we all cast an eye over my motley assemblage of entires into cyberspace, the football fiction, the events or the authors I’ve encountered, but you know what? You can read through those posts yourself. Have a wee look at the archive thing, past the posts, on the side there. >>>>>>

One thing that has been very curious though is the popularity of this picture of a woman holding her ball. I used it to discuss women’s football, and maybe highlight the attractiveness of their more graceful game, but for some reason this photo keeps pulling visitors into my wee football fictive world. Now I’ve put pictures of Hiedi Klum, David Beckham, Jessica Alba, Robbie Williams, Jessica Biel, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, the girl from Sex in the City, a women’s beach volleyball team and Danny Glover in my posts and yet the picture of the woman holding the ball has been the most requested, looked at, linked to article on my humble pages. Obviously I would love the main attractions to be my dazzling wit, rapacious insight, content, football fiction celebrities or even my sense of humour, but if it means people are reading it, it can’t be a bad thing. Can it? As unfortunate or desperate or debauched as detractors find it, sex really does sell.

And that leads me nicely to my next point.

I can only sit back and wonder why the W-League is not picking up even bigger audiences, it’s being marketed well, Australia’s ABC have been televising weekend games and the football’s good - if you needed any more convincing that it was worth watching Tameka Butt’s absolutely delicious goal against Melbourne Victory, a perfectly weighted curler into the postage stamp, is an excellent example. I can assure you it’s a belter but have a look anyway .

Our local team, the Women’s Queenland Roar, have just won the minor premiership and are odds on favourites to win the grand final in mid January too. The peeps at thesimplestgame would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the girls. They have our full support and ask that they would have yours too dear reader.

I know there isn’t much football fiction in this post, but there will be loads in the new year including a look at David Williams (Little Britain) foray into the young adult fiction market.

Before I finish I would quickly like to point to the close, and obviously unrelated, timing of the Australian Government's announcement of a $6.1bn effort to tackle homelessness and the success of the homeless world cup which finished on December 7th (that's another two fingers to you, Andrew Bolt).

To everyone else thesimplestgame says, enjoy your holidays, enjoy your pressies (if you’re lucky enough to get any), enjoy yourself (I don’t mean it like that... but if that’s what it takes, knock yourself out – just wash your hands afterwards). Go merrily onwards and Slainte!

The Faltrain's graceful but the football...?

Another book for the girls this week. Actually, technically, its books. Australian author, Cath Crowley’s Gracie Faltrain series. It’s popular YA fiction, it’s a trilogy, its about football and its for girls which makes it almost unique. In having all this, it should be applauded. Should it though? Is it deserving of a place on the football fiction shelf?

In contrast to last week’s review I started reading book 1, The Life and Times…, expecting it to be spectacular. Gracie is a winner. But from thesimplestgame’s perspective it’s far from spectacular. We meet GF in Year 8 (aged 13, I think). She’s been playing in the football team for three years and she’s having trouble. Her best friend moves away, she fancies the unattainable smiling hunk and doesn’t see the quiet achiever beside her. He’s having his own problems right enough. Then school bitch gives her a hard time, things on the park get positively monstrous (not just because she won’t play nice with the other kids) and her Mum and Dad look like they’re in trouble too. All ingredient boxes ticked then for a mill run teen angst story.

Where Gracie scores is for readers not necessarily interested in football. They will read it, swallow it whole, I’d imagine. It’s a genuinely earnest and engaging book. It's good and the issues - real issues affecting girls (well as a boy what I would imagine the real issues girls face) are dealt with, eh… realistically? Better than that, in doing her thing Gracie has the potential to turn a whole new audience on to football. And the people at thesimplestgame are all for that.
Unfortunately discerning football fans will have put it down after the first 20 pages. I almost did.

Good characters with emotional depth kept me there. They are Crowley’s strong suit. The story, told from a number of characters points of view, has great form and reads well too. But the football is rotten. Almost criminal. Like pish. Poorly phrased, it lacks articulation, resonance and any semblance of the real thing.

I’ve chosen to focus on the first Gracie, but I’ve started the second, ...takes control, and if anything there seems to be even less football in it. The writing is improved. It seems everything but the football is getting better. The fact that it’s well written makes the football look even worse. We don’t kick goals, we score them. Gracie can’t make goals either.

Now, I read recently that Cath openly notes she's only ever played football once. I’ve also read that she was asked by her editors to put some football in her book about a girl playing football. So it’s no surprise that it lacks in the football stakes. Not exactly a promising sign.

Crowley’s work does, however, raise some interesting questions about grammar and use of language in writing football. To make it sound authentic and /or familiar to football fans it has to be written to populist conventions. The vernacular and the colloquialisms are as important as the football itself. If evidence is needed, look at the sports pages in any newspaper.

Having it grammatically correct isn’t important. The right thing to say is Manchester United is playing Arsenal, but to football fans the world over it’s not right. Man U are playing Arsenal. Football fiction should be written the way it’s reported in the papers except with narrative, plot, characters and depth. This is what Crowley has missed. It’s not enough to stand at the sidelines and learn some patter. This criticism could be put on the doorstep of the editors who told her to add the football. Ten minutes with any football pundit, not necessarily SBS’s Craig Foster, would’ve straightened them out and made a huge improvement to the book.

But even where the football isn’t the best, Gracie Faltrain raises some interesting questions about how football fiction is written and who’s writing it, so it gets a berth on the shelf. But it’s only rolled over the line, quite a come down from the postage stamp free kick I expected.

Cath Crowley's own site has all the books.
Or you could try Pan MacMillan.

…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