Talking of books
Foot bull
Benny Green
It is a fact of unimpeachable historical authority that in 1873, in the week before the football international match between England and Scotland, the enemy, distressed by an acute embarrassment of poverty, inserted this advertisement in national newspapers — "International v. England; Scotsmen desirous of playing are requested to send their names without delay to the Honorary Secretary, Scots XI." The significant conclusion about that extraordinary appeal is when the match was eventually played, at Kennington Oval, England won by only four goals to two, which suggests that England too must have recruited its players from the local alehouses. Six years later, again at Kennington. England played the first twenty minutes of the match against Wales with ten men, because the eleventh man, W. E. Clegg, was working late in Sheffield preparing evidence in the trial of Charlie Peace, Last Saturday, half the population of England watched the Cup Final, and the late Richard Crossman once went on record as saying that the defeat of the Labour Party in the 1970 election was to do with England's elimination from the World Cup by the West Germans a few days before polling day.
The advance of football from a public school lark to a worldwide religion masquerading as a ball game will probably come in time to rank as the one lasting contribution by the English to world culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professional historians are beginning to realise that now L.C.B. Seaman is quite right to point the parallels between cricket and the muscular Christianity of the last century, and Sir Robert Ensor was very wise to observe that the development of organised games "on any reckoning may rank among England's leading contributions to world culture."
People always laugh at this sort of thing of course — until something happens like this season's amazing triumph of Wimbledon over Burnley, and the same club's attempt to defeat Leeds United which was foiled only by the curious manners which the Leeds team displays on all public occasions. In the past there was Yeovil and Hereford and all the rest of the giantkillers, so I see no reason at all why a novelist should not publish a romance about an obscure side which actually wins the cup. After all, since the great levelling process in English football, which has successfully dragged all sides down to the intellectual and moral depths of the chief officials of the Football League, why should not an obscure lousy side do just as well in competition as the famous lousy sides?
Tha,t baldly is the theme of a very unusual and rather appealing short novel* by J. L. Carr, who toys with the idea of what happens when an academic approach is brought to bear on the game. As George Best has been quoted recently in Michael Parkinson's biography, football is basically a simple game and only halfwits like the professional commentators and managers and reporters pretend it is anything else. So why shouldn't a fresh academic brain perceive new techniques? In Carr's novel a Hungarian deep thinker lays down six golden rules including those referring to the advantages of owning a ridiculously inadequate playing surface (which will seem much more inadequate to your visitors than it ever will to you) and the possession of an unbeatable goalkeeper. Having acquired these valuable assets, and haying then practiced the great precept of the great Wilfred Mannion, who once played for small Middlesborough, that is, running along in possession of the ball without looking down at it. Carr's village side goes on to amazing triumphs.
The idea is as old as football itself, indeed even older, and has been a conventional device for novelists for at least sixty years. The earliest example I have been able to trace is in an early short story by Wodehouse called 'The Goalkeeper and the Plutocrat,' in which Houndsditch Wednesday, due to play Manchester United in the Cup Final, "had rather less chance in the forthcoming tourney than a stuffed rat in the Battersea Dogs' Home," But Houndsditch Wednesday win, and so does Mr Carr's village team, who knock out Leeds United, Manchester City and Aston Villa before defeating Glasgow Rangers in the first British Cup Final in history.
What is so engaging about Carr's cautionary tale is that it delivers with a kind of derisive gaiety some murderous blows at the fatheads who populate professional football today. The hack reporters polish up their purple prose, members of Parliament ask questions in the House, Chief Constables of local Constabularies write official letters, and everyone more or less makes a fool of himself as the team of midgets plods towards Wembley Stadium and imperishable glory. At a time when so much pompous pseudo-scientific garbage is spoken and written about George Best's simple game, it was not a bad idea of Mr Carr's to blow a raspberry at the whole business, a raspberry justified by the considerable knowledge and deep affection he evidently has for football. And anyone who thinks that Carr's plot is too ridiculous even for fiction, might try walking the streets of Sunderland and see how far he gets.
. *How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup J. L. Carr (London Magazine Editions £2.50)
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