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.

staff boundaries

I was in a large bookshop yesterday. For the sake of the story, we’ll call it Boundaries. Hey, before you throw down in disgust. Try it. It makes you feel much better about shopping in your favourite independent bookshop. Boundaries has lots of books. A lot. A really good selection. But then, they should have. It’s a feckin BIG shop and maybe that’s why it’s kind of expensive, but maybe it's not. I'm talking expensive compared to independent bookshop prices. Take Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends. $32.95 in yer local independent. $57 in Boundaries. I mean Really? Is there any need for that shit. I thought the idea of the corporate homogeneity is larger volume, cheaper prices. The Indies can be more expensive than chain-store equivalents sometimes, but at least you get the benefit of informed, interested staff who generally know what they’re talking about. In chain-world this is the exception rather than the rule, but we get it and we even accept it. The indies want you to come back because they like it so, so much they want you to do the same.

Boundaries isn’t always more expensive, mind. There are exceptions. The ugly spine of ‘fast book nation’ mentalities coupled with economies of scale allow for the notorious 3-for-the-price-2-deal. A bargain? It would be except there’s only ever really one book you want. There’s maybe one other, but it’s a half-interest; a might read if you ever get done reading the things you want to read. The rest you’ve either read already or never will. It’s the ‘more you spend the more you save’ sham. Still it must work for some people and charities like Lifeline definitely benefit.

Before I go on I should declare my part-time employment in a particularly good indie in Brisbane. This is hardly an objective piece, BUT were I otherwise employed, I’m confident I’d make the same observations.

While I was in Boundaries, I asked a staff member at the counter if there was a sports fiction section? He looked at me like I’d asked him if I could poo in his shoe. “You what, mate?” he says.
I said, “Sports fiction – fiction with sport in it. D’you have any books or even a section of sports fiction?” He looked at me the way people look in empty plastic bags, when they know there’s nothing in them. They’re done with them. Only good for drowning seagulls now.
So I said, “You know books that are fictional and have sport in them?”
He actually scratched his head.

Now the first time, it could well have been my lilting Scottish brogue that confused him. The second time maybe too. But the third time I said it like I was patronising a non-English speaker. Hand signals and everything. “You know? Books…that…Ah rrre …phic shon al …annnDD… have… sssspoarrrt… iiinnn… tthem?” I said it the way Lee Majors ran after he’d had the $6million dollar operation, a bit of creaking and a lot of slow motion.
Still…
Nothing.
A solid wall of blankness.
It was disconcerting.
Another scratch and a flicker of light intruded into the empty space in his eyes. He said, “There’s some sports books upstairs mate.”
He was right. But they were all non-fiction. I said, “Yeah thanks.”

What chance do I have of establishing football fiction as a genre if the staff at one of the city’s largest bookshops cannot imagine that a thing like sports fiction exists?

A floating green zone of fantasy

The title of this post is taken from The Global Game. I think it's relevant to all football fiction, but it works well for this week football fiction subject. Comics. How good were, no, are they?

My first experience of the wonder, romance and let's be honest no small amount of nonsense of football fiction was in comic book stories like those in Tiger (1954-1985) and Eagle (1950-1994), where star quality football stories like Billy’s Boots, filled with Dead-shot Dean’s football magic, won him all the games and scored all the goals he really needed to score. What I would have done for a pair of those incredible boots. The closest I got to a pair was the wobbly boots on a saturday night.

Hotshot Hamish has been reprised in one of Scotland's most popular weekly Scottish national newspapers - The Sunday Mail (I said popular I never said worthy). Still it warms the cockles knowing a whole new generation will be able to experience the power of Hamish's size 16. He could smash a canon ball shot straight through a steel plated A-team built vehicle without so much as a pity the fool - and he's Scottish. His team mate highlanders, including the insanely goofy Mighty Mouse, benefitted from the big man's big toes more than once.

Roy of the Rovers, possibly the most famous of all the football comic strip characters, is also still being produced in a number of fanzines as far as I'm aware. More gifted than Best, Pele, Ronaldhino and Michael Flatley combined Roy could do anthing with a ball. The comic ran through Roy's incredible career, management jobs included and then even soapily involved his son's adventures. As far as I'm aware, they followed the great tradition of famous footballer's sons the world over, in that he failed to capture his father's acclaimed success or any of his ability. Still he managed a career - which is more than can be said for my own game.

Striker, The Sun newspaper's long standing football player comic leaned toward the adult end of the market, ye know more tragic footballer's wives than wizened old boots with any magic in them. Particularly when it changed to 3D in an effort to keep up with the times. If nothing else it was a series which was remarkable for its unremarkableness.

There are many others. Football comics first appeared with regularity in the early 1920's, but that's a blog for another day.

It was long before I moved to books, novels mostly, only to be haunted by the lack of football. It seemed there were no football novels. Things may have changed a little, but it's a little and I'd like to go some way to putting those ghosts to rest in the creative practice parts of my PhD.

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.