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| Will Buckley and Sarah Wardle are both keen football fans and here explore this great British obsession. Will talks about how it is reflected in our literature generally while Sarah takes on football, poetry and fiction. |
| Sports journalism in the UK is in a great state. The broadsheets are producing their own supplements, the tabloids have some fantastic writers and even the fanzines are going strong. Kevin Mitchell looks at exactly where it's at. Meanwhile Hunter Davies offers an overview of footballing biographies and how they have changed over the years. |
| Although some may argue that sport and politics aren’t a comfortable mix, in the end it’s hard to keep the two separate. Simon Kuper examines the ties that bind literature, politics and sport while Liz Crolley explores issues around women in sports writing. |
| Poet Ian McMillan had an inspired idea and talked Barnsley Football Club into helping him to achieve his goal. Here he talks about being the first poet-in-residence at a British football club. |
| Jim Sells from the Literacy Trust is manager of the Reading the Game project that aims to get young people into books through their love of football. Further details of that initiative can be found here. |
| Tim Parks has written on sport in both his fiction and non-fiction. Here he explores the dramatic impact of sporting thrills and spills in literature. |
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The British Council in Germany recently ran a project profiling football and literature. Chris Dolan was invited to take part in this project and talks about what the experience meant to him.
As writer-in-residence in two of Glasgow’s most deprived areas – Easterhouse, and then Drumchapel – I quickly discovered that encouraging school pupils to write stories and poems had rather limited success. The academically inclined teenagers responded well and produced some interesting work but the groups I was most interested in – those bright, sparky, sometimes troublesome, boys and girls who are often more likely to be the most artistic if only the curriculum would give them an outlet for their dormant talents – seldom saw the point. For many of them, especially the boys, it was sport they actually spent any voluntary time reading about. Football (this being Scotland) was their passion. The moment I asked them to write match reports, accounts of games they had played in or watched, biographies of real and imagined players, the work began to roll in. A few girls shared the love of the beautiful game – and one or two produced excellent pieces on why they detested it.
American literature has always had games and physical endurance at its heart. The pioneer spirit perhaps, a battle with and against nature since the Founding Fathers, the resultant need for recreation on the field, an escape from the dangers of settling harsh lands in the safety of a rule-bound sport. From Moby Dick to Hemingway, Call of the Wild to DeLillo, New World writing has celebrated Man’s, and, less often, Woman’s, feats of strength, precision and sporting intelligence. I looked out forstories that might interest the kids in Easterhouse and Drumchapel – bits of Mark Twain, Bernard Malamud, Kerouac,. lines from Maya Angelou, excerpts from Joan Didion and Robin Jenkins’ wonderful The Thistle and the Grail, of course.
But generally, finding examples from European literature was harder, which is strange, given this Continent’s obsession with football, cricket, golf and cycling. Sports, particularly in a British context, are a prism through which we can learn much about class division, male anger and female exclusion. Of course there’s the cricket match in L. P. Hartley’s The Go Between and various other examples, but games and literature share the same arena much less often than you would imagine. Recent writing is bridging the gap – Tom Leonard and the ‘Edinburgh Beats’ for example in Scotland; Nick Hornby and Tim Parks south of the Border.
An invitation then to take part in the British Council’s House of Football and Culture festival in Berlin came as a pleasant, and inspiring, surprise. With the build-up to the Germany 2006 World Cup Finals already well under way, the Berlin British Council saw an opportunity to link two great passions shared by both our countries. A unique opportunity to examine, discuss, and revel in words and headers, poems and passes.
I had been invited because the organisers happened to spot a story I had written for the Celtic View. As it happens, I am a Celtic supporter, but that’s not the reason why this particular commission was so exciting. Celtic is an east-end team with, like Rangers and most other British clubs, an overwhelmingly working-class support. The View is read by thousands of fans every month. Paul Cuddihy, the magazine’s editor, had seen the opportunity to provide a platform for new and established writers, and for an audience that in the main, doesn’t have much access to writing and storytelling. A writer of fiction himself, he sensed the deep connections between the drama of football and self-expression through stories. Both activities have rules and form that can be pushed to the limit to provide powerful narratives. Both, at their best, capture the rawness, the unpredictability and excitement of life. They are inspired by the same impulses – the desires to play, take part, to acknowledge a team or a community. To transcend the banalities of daily life. And, as Dickens said of good writing, the universal lies in the local – football is simultaneously a territorial and an international game.
Berlin, on the eve of the world’s greatest football competition, was an appropriate place to be. Paul Cuddihy and I took a session between us, on a warm early-autumn evening at the British Council’s perfectly-positioned HQ in Mitte. Paul spoke about the Celtic View’s experiment, the writers who have contributed so far (including Anne Donovan and Des Dillon, plus some newer writers), and the response from fans and the club. He also read a beautifully crafted, moving story about a son using football footage to bring his father, momentarily, back from the fog of Alzheimer’s. My own piece ‘Roisin Dubh’ is the tale of a violin – football and music, twin bridges for Irish immigrants to Scotland.
Through a colleague I had worked with before, Jay D’Arcy at Reykjavik University, I had come across a poem of Sir Walter Scott’s:
Up with the Banner, let forests winds fan her,
She has blazed over Ettrick eight ages and more;
In sport we’ll attend her, in battle defend her,
With heart and with hand, like our fathers before.
Then strip, lads, and to it, though sharp be the weather,
And if by mischance, you should happen to fall,
There are worse things in life than a tumble on heather,
And life is itself but a game at foot-ball.
Celebrating a local football match in the Scottish Borders in 1815, this might well be the first soccer poem of all time – and already the pundits’ love of war imagery, loyalty and fights to the death are deeply embedded.
In Berlin we discovered that Tottenham Hotspur have a poet-in-residence, Sarah Wardle. Nicole Seimer wrote Frauen als Fußballfans. (Watching the Boys Play – Women as Football Fans). A special treat was hearing Tim Parks reading from his wonderful A Season with Verona. Any football fan will testify to Parks’s accuracy in depicting the pain, pleasure and madness of the game. And any football-hater should read it to understand the fan’s tortured mindset. The festival’s film programme was also excellent - particularly the documentary The Game of their Lives, - a history of the legendary North-Korean national side who qualified for the World Cup in England in 1966, even making it to the quarter-final, beating Italy en route.
National, cultural and linguistic barriers were easily swept away by a shared love of goals and trophies – our own audience were fascinated by the fact that your average Scot will wear German strips and cheer on the German side whenever they play England (though personally, I’m a rare exception). A new international language was being created by the synthesis of those two great expressions of humanity – art and sport. I returned determined to see a similarly ambitious and successful festival being organised in Scotland.
In conversation once with Nick Hornby, I told him that Will Self had called his writing ‘middle-brow’. Hornby’s response was: ‘Tell Will to put a high-brow eleven together and our middle-brow team will tank them.’ I passed on the message, and Self responded enthusiastically to the challenge.
I write this on the very night after Scotland crashed miserably out of the World Cup. Paul and I won’t, sadly, be back in Berlin to cheer on our side, but we picked up a few stylish European moves and can perhaps begin to build a soccer-minded German-Scots literary team and even take on Hornby and Self’s Englishmen.
Chris Dolan is the winner of the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Prize, and the 1999 Robert Louis Stevenson Award. His collection of short stories Poor Angels was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. |
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