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| 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. |
| The British Council in Germany recently ran a project profiling football and literature. Here, British Council organiser Marijke Brouwer talks about the impact of this stunning event while writer Chris Dolan explains what it all meant to him. |
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Sarah Wardle is a keen football fan and here talks about football, poetry and fiction.
Football is alive and kicking as a theme in contemporary poetry. Two seminal first collections, by poetry premiership league leaders, Simon Armitage and Don Paterson, include football imagery, which in some ways characterises their tones and styles. The title poem of Simon Armitage’s Zoom! uses language and human consciousness as a metaphor for man’s snowballing identity, or ambition, as it accelerates off the planet. This testosterone-fuelled trajectory begins ‘as a house’ but soon snowballs ‘to a town with all four major clearing banks,/ a daily paper/ and a football team pushing for promotion’, becoming ‘city, nation, hemisphere’, till eventually, having gathered supporters and speed, to the poet’s relief it disappears into a next-door galaxy. This urgent semantic energy is a trademark of Armitage’s work. By contrast, the title poem of Don Paterson’s Nil Nil transmits his winning bleakness and looks at the opposite scenario, extrapolating an imaginary fall from a peak of team success towards an infinity of oblivion. The postmodern poem deconstructs the game and moves ‘From the top, then, the zenith, the silent footage:/ McGrandle, majestic in ankle-length shorts’ to two boys ‘playing desperate two-touch with a bald tennis ball’ with ‘the plot thinning down to a point so refined/ not even the angels could dance on it. Goodbye’. Dreams of ambition and disaster are bound up with the sport.
Many football poems picture a match as a mirror to inner conflict. Wendy Cope in Roger Bear’s Football Poems from Serious Concerns artfully depicts the inner child in the adult supporter, the contest between the mask of brave masculinity and the spontaneity of excitement and boyish glee:‘Who beat Leeds/ Then beat them again?/ Tottenham Hotspur -/ A bunch of real men…Will they beat Everton?/ We’ll wait to see/ Please get a ticket/ for Wendy and me’. Meanwhile, Greta Stoddart in 'Myth' from At Home in the Dark invites us to feel the sexual tension of a bursting football stadium, in a highly charged and atmospheric sonnet on watching Chelsea play on a television in a hotel bedroom. Simon Armitage’s 'Goalkeeper with a Cigarette' pits conflicting ideals against each other, physical fitness versus self-inflicted damage to health, and hardwon success versus laidback cool, while in 'Ten Pence Story' he uses a tarnished coin’s complaints about being ‘badly bartered’ and not eligible for the toss at Wembley as a metaphor for experiential inequality.
But it is Tony Harrison’s long and innovative poem, v. that is the most challenging and rewarding football poem by a contemporary poet. The many structuralist oppositions within society are portrayed in this acclaimed poem, which uses a football metaphor to spotlight the artificial categories of ‘them and us’ and superficial ideologies of difference, at the same time as celebrating unity and ancestral bonds. The wordplay on ‘versus’ and ‘verses’ criticises both the polarisation of divisions and social policies that cause these, while promoting the harmony of civilised attitudes and expression. v. in many ways anticipated the politics of the 1990s and was both a sensitive response to the destruction of the miners’ communities in the 1980s and a call back to the basics of family values and education, education, education, harking back to Thomas Gray for a precedent. Tony Harrison tackles all the 'versus' of life – ‘Coal Board MacGregor v the NUM’, Left v Right, Leeds v Derby, black v white, Methodist v Church of England, Hindu v Sikh, male v female and East v West. But above all, standing at the graves of his grandmother and parents, he breaks down the oppositions of Earth and Heaven, and life and death. The ‘United’ graffiti spray-canned on his parents’ headstone comes to articulate their transcendence, not transience, and the decaying wood and coal and May petals are seen as parts of a whole eco-system. Harrison is even reconciled with his rebellious alter ego, as his literary achievements, aspirations and aspirates are laid alongside memories of his own youthful behaviour and the defacing football fan’s distinctive brand of heightened language and diction.
If football is the modern opium of the people, some of its literature too has a feel-good factor, but the books that stay with one are those that chart the downers as well as the uppers. What makes Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch better than the film version are the faithful minutiae of moods and decades and the insight into prerequisite reactions of the male psyche in adversity as well as triumph. Will Buckley’s tour de force, The Man Who Hated Football, similarly tackles the dark side as well as the buzz of the beautiful game, through a hard-hitting satire of sports journalism and football, sex and fatherhood. He strikes at the heart of hilarity and shoots to grin. From a woman’s perspective at games, the window onto male clan behaviour that is entertaining, and the bird’s eye view has itself been analysed in books such as Anne Coddington’s One of the Lads, which takes a critical look at the women who follow football. Meanwhile, Andrew Gummer’s book, You Come With Me – I Get Tickets, looks at how football fans from all over Europe respond to the game, from the songs they sing to their behaviour, fireworks and referees. Websites devoted to football and literature range from the lively and inspiring www.footballpoets.com to the ingenious and enterprising www.philosophyfootball.com.
For all its apparent divisions, football with its clubs, supporters, season ticket holders and family fans has wide appeal and represents a classless society. The players the crowds celebrate are stars who have won their status through a meritocratic system. The appetite for individuality among publishers is mirrored on the football pitch and the line-up for literary prizes is as diverse as the Premiership. With an emphasis in contemporary literature on the need to be complex, yet not élitist, football has proved an interesting theme for writers to kick around.
Sarah Wardle is poet-in-residence with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Her books include Score! and Fields Away. |
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