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 2

John Turnbull is the editor of a colourful, often beautiful and equally riotous, truly international, collection of football writing called The Global Game. But I told you that last week. I’ve now read a whole lot more of the book. It's a remarkable piece of work. I'll tell you more when I review it. Right now I want to post some more of the answers John generously gave when we spoke to him about football fiction.

thesimplestgame: 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. Would you agree with either of them?

John Turbull: It is true that little content in The Global Game: Writers on Soccer describes match action. Orhan Pamuk’s comment is suggestive: football is faster than words.

Matches tend best to be described in the recollection, when the action can be parsed and account made of the writer’s perspective as supporter or participant. Ian Plenderleith himself, in “Save of the Day,” describes his protagonist making a series of stops in goal, but the narrative keeps its distance. “My life at that time,” the narrator says, “was in fact a series of mental football games.” Other writers have made use of the unique existential position of the goalkeeper to help get around this conundrum – the need to describe action at a pace faster than that possible on a page. A notable example is Peter Handke in The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. Albert Camus and Vladimir Nabokov have drawn on their time as young players – both goalkeepers – with Nabokov famously saying that, at Cambridge, he served less as the keeper of goal than “keeper of a secret.” The goalkeeper, to Nabokov, is “lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender.” He continues, writing in Conclusive Evidence:

I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with an aura of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his knee-guards, the gloves protruding from the hip-pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team.

One of the most sustained descriptions of match action I have encountered, in English, is that by Barry Hines in A Kestrel for a Knave (1968). Again the young hero, Billy Casper, is a goalkeeper – and not a very committed one. At one point he climbs onto the crossbar “to scratch his arm pits, kicking his legs and imitating chimp sounds.”

One criterion for composing credible match action might be that the matches do not replicate fixtures in the real world. Were one to insert 10 pages of Arsenal v. West Ham in a novel – unless something were happening in the stands (as in Yury Olesha’s Envy), or the account were written from a fractured, Joycean perspective (like the match description in Antonio Skármeta’s I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning) – it is hard to imagine how this would serve exposition. (Chris Cleave’s Incendiary is based on an attack at Emirates Stadium during Arsenal-Chelsea, but I have not read the book.) But given that the authors above have integrated their own memories and imaginings into a world they have created, with their own characters and narrative logic, the football matches they describe take on meaning. Consider that the football scene in Hines’s Kes consumes 20 pages (the match itself is roughly eight pages) of a fairly short novel – Hines must have felt that the football evoked important qualities in Casper’s character.

I should also mention that as I write about “match action” and descriptions of such, I think of a male-centered world. This is a bias that is hard to discard. It might be interesting to analyze how Nalinaksha Bhattacharya, in Hem and Football and Hem and Maxine, integrates football action within novels involving a principally female cast.

Regarding Nick Hornby’s comment, I would be interested to learn more about the context. I suppose, if you think about Zidane’s head-butt near the conclusion of the 2006 World Cup final, it would be hard to create a more dramatic football scenario on the page. Yet if one were to construct a story that integrates Zidane’s upbringing in stretched circumstances in Marseilles, his conflicted heritage as a Berber and Frenchman, his talismanic role on a timeless green zone of fantasy, liberated for 90-minute intervals from all inhibition ... the climax might appear still more thunderous.

Hornby himself has written a lovely fable, Small Country of a boy press-ganged into playing for the national XI of the mythical Champina. (He read the story, part of a McSweeney’s collection published in New York, on an American radio program in 2005.) So, it’s likely that Hornby would wish to nuance this statement, if he has not done so already.

Part 3 of this interview will follow next week. In the meantime I've set about tracking down some of the books he mentions. At least the ones I haven't got yet.

thesimplestgame are extremely grateful for John's time and generosity in providing us with so much material for the site and for the PhD. Thank you John.

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

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.

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.

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.