Football is our nation’s sport. Many of us
love it. Many of us hate it. No one can avoid it. Yet for all
its coverage and celebrity few fiction books are written about it. Only
David Peace has come to mainstream prominence for his ‘faction’ writing,
combining journalistic rigour with creative license to draw portraits on Messrs
Clough and Shankly in Damned United and
Red or Dead. A lot of
this might be to do with snobbery. Literature is seen as highbrow; football
low. Consequently, football rarely gets a kick when it comes to literary publishing.
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| I really recommend David Peace. |
Last year I had Ross Raisin’s book A Natural on my wish list. In 2008 my friend Jim introduced Raisin to me. His debut novel God’s Own Country, set in the Yorkshire
Moors, heralded the arrival of a bright, young talent. Raisin wrote in the
vernacular, capturing the voice of the rural north, telling a story that belied
the country-bumpkin stereotype, instead invoking the Brontian depiction of brutal hill
life. His follow-up Waterline was a quiet masterpiece: set in post-shipbuilding Glasgow it tells the story of a
craftsman’s slide into homelessness. Again, Raisin proved himself a wonderful
mimic, funnelling Glaswegian onto the page. In both books Raisin
proved himself adept at documenting life on the margins. The farming and
shipbuilding community get very little press attention; in showing us these
worlds we get an insight into places forgotten by Westminster.
As well as my love for Raisin’s previous
books, I was excited about The Natural because
it was about the world of football. I’ve been a football fan since I was six
years old. In supporting Watford I’ve mainly seen us stagnate in football's second
tier. Although there have been years where we’ve plumbed the depths
of the third, today we soar the skies of the Premier League. As a child
too, I would spend my holidays in Swanage where my Auntie Joan ... (Joan, for the record, wasn’t my
real aunt; she was a friend of my Nan. When is this fake branding of aunts
and uncles going to stop? I think it’s a conspiracy by parents to make us buy
presents for their children. If people keep calling me ‘uncle Ryan’ in front of
their children, subconsciously I feel bound to them. So when I’m
visiting I think, “I must get my nephew/niece a present.” It’s only know I’ve really thought about it that I realise what a racket these parents
are running. It’s a McMafia crime ring on a global scale. I bet the nefarious MumsNet are behind it.) Back to Joan: she
used to take my brother and I to watch Bournemouth play in the days they didn’t have
a millionaire chairman. A time of terraces, clackers and pools
coupon; where cheating and diving were a Black
Mirror episode, and team numbers were 1-11. So when it comes to football my eyes are journeymen: they’ve seen the highs of Cristiano Ronaldo’s
dancing feet; they’ve witnessed the lows of Devon White falling over himself.
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| I used to stand here at Bournemouth. |
Like his other novels, Raisin’s book A Natural turns its binoculars on an
unreported part of Britain: lower league football. Tom Pearman has been ‘let
go’ by a Premier League club and must now ply his trade in the pitches Murdoch
forgot. Uprooted from his boyhood club and home, he is in every sense ‘heading south.’ Cast out of the footballing heavens, he must now live a Partridge limbo of hotel residence and takeout meals. He’s quiet too, which
makes interacting with other players difficult. Fortunately, life improves when a surrogate family take him under roof, sheltering him with curfews
and chatter. The Daveys take in young footballers because they
love the team, known only in the book as Town, and because their eldest
children have gone and upped sticks. Liam, the groundsman for Town, is one such
child; it's he who strikes up a friendship with Tom.
Over the course of the book we see how this
friendship grows into a clandestine relationship, with both men fully aware of
its dangers. The love affair between the two is redolent of Brokeback Mountain with Liam being the
more experienced, and Tom the more taciturn of the two. Like Proulx’s novella, the
men are homosexuals in a heteronormative world: different lifestyles are for elsewhere; they can't exist here. This is painfully characterised in the few sex scenes between the two, where Tom’s fit of sexual pleasure soon recedes into burning shame.
The book doesn’t just shine a light on gay
footballers – which there must be some- it also exposes the ‘footballer's wife' stereotype. Because of the ITV show and World Cup WAG coverage,
footballers wives are often seen as pan holders in the OK magazine gold rush. The
tabloids present these women as intellectually stupid and Machiavellian
smart when it comes to ‘snagging’ footballing real estate. The truth is a
lot of footballers meet their girlfriends in childhood, when indoor pools and
country house self-portraits don't exist. For wives of league two players, their husbands earn a kind slice, but they hardly make a
whole pie; as a result their job description is vast: budget a huge mortgage, raise children, promote husband’s ego, relegate personal dreams, abate footballing depressions: injury, trolling, loss of form, transfer talk, terrace chants; all whilst looking beautiful. Raisin explores these challenges through the character of Leah, the wife of Town’s captain.
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| Not every WAG is auto-tuned. |
In making a gay footballer and footballer’s
wife the two central characters of the story, Raisin’s novel breaks
new ground. David Peace’s books focused on the titans of the game, the men
at the centre circle of sporting history; Raisin, on the other hand, has
taken the match ball home, telling us the stories of what happens behind closed
doors. Therefore, A Natural, is an
intimate novel that deserves greater recognition. Quite
why this book wasn't lauded in the same way as his first is mystifying. Because through A Natural, Raisin
has cemented himself as a natural writer, one who has sacrificed linguistic step overs for passing insightful comment. He is the Michael Carrick of writers. One who deserves his name sung from the terraces.
A Natural is out now.
