The world’s greatest game, it obsesses millions not just on Saturday and/or Sunday, but throughout the week. So why is football so under represented in “the arts,” that fill the time between games for the average fan.
We watch TV, watch films, we read books, we may even read poetry. Whether it is Casualty, House or ER, Waking the Dead, Bones or, Taggart, Star Trek, Dr Who, or Battlestar Galactica. Hospitals, crime, and aliens fill our TV schedules, cinema listings and the shelves of all good bookshops. But where is the Football?
The less said about Dream Team and Footballers Wives the better. Many of us will remember the half time nonsense during our FA Trophy semi (Woking v Rushden 1995) with Rushden & Diamonds for George Cole’s "An Independent Man.” How many takes can you possibly need for an actor not to miss a tap in? The Manageress had its moments, and probably the best ever fictional football matches were in BBC’s Born Kicking, probably because the lead character’s fictional team was made up of Woking’s 1990/91 Squad.
In film we have….Escape to Victory….actually last time it was on I did watch, and Stallone’s penalty save was still as funny as ever.
I only told you to blow
the bloody doors off!
Or something…….
Goal 1/2/3 are better than the usual Hollywood produced sackurr movies, but only just. When Saturday Comes? Oh dear. There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble? The creator of Billy’s Boots should have sued. Though they did get around the tricky moral question as to whether Billy was cheating by wearing the boots. Jimmy's Boots belonged to someone who actually had no great talent. However the match scenes, shot at Maine Road were as poor as ever.
Here I actually envy the Americans their regimented, over-specialised, constantly pausing games of Baseball, Basketball, and American Football. They make great films. It just doesn’t seem as contrived as the last minute penalty or the mazy dribble past at least 15 defenders. A Relief Pitcher will come to strike out the last two batters in the bottom of the 9th. The last score in basketball usually is seconds or less before the buzzer, and games have been won with a hail-mary last ditch touchdown pass from 70 yards out.
Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, Hoosiers and Coach Carter, Rudy and The Longest Yard (Burt Reynolds NOT Adam Sandler) are all better movies, have better scripts and better scenes of the actual sport. The Game of Their Lives might step up to the plate (sorry even their metaphors are better) and the story of the US team that went to the 1950 World Cup and defeated England in Belo Horizonte might just deliver.
As for non-American productions, The Damned United is great, but it’s about a man, not the sport. Joyeux Noel/Merry Christmas, gets an honourable mention. After singing carols during the 1914 truce the soldiers played the famous match in no-man's land. The Germans apparently won 3-2, and the brass on both sides then ordered that a stop be put to “this madness,” and seemingly the cease-fire came to an end the way it started, by ,mutual consent.
OK so the beautiful game is difficult to re-create on screen – they gave it a go in Bloomfield – Richard Harris as a player coming to the end of his career, uncertain about his future.
Maybe the written word holds the answer, with our own imagination anything is possible. So what is the great football novel? Albert Camus, the Nobel Literature laureate, was a goalkeeper, and claimed that all he knew about morality and life, he had learned through football – but he never wrote about it. The truth is there just hasn’t been one. There are plenty of excellent books about real football, but in fiction, the best I can offer is Dominic Holland’s The Ripple Effect. The story of a fan’s desperate fight to save his club from relegation to The Conference.
We are often told how a player is Poetry in Motion, so perhaps the descendants of the bard can help us out…no. Neither John Betjamen, Ted Hughes, nor Andrew Motion, saw fit to address football, eminent poets all, ignoring the single subject that can hold a nation spellbound. So….I offer
Dumb as Hell by Barry Van Allen
I propose that the days of the week
be changed as follows
Startwork, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Payday, Funday
Football
(Nice, but being from the US, he may well be talking about American football)
So I guess it’s up to me, and I make no apology for the event I chose
West Bromwich Albion 2 Woking 4
January afternoon
Grey rain falls from a Black Country sky
Muddy green
Cold seeking every exposed fingertip
FA Cup Saturday
Scalding Bovril and soggy programmes
Professionals
Draughtsmen, Plasterers and Cabbies
The fug of tobacco
Amid the unbelieving rose a steam of hope
Tribal solidarity
In wondrous belief we watched
The ball hesitated
And Timmy struck with an arc of sweet accuracy
We leapt in joyous unison,
As shaking cold droplets from its strands
The net bulged
With a shape that was beautiful
I cried
And hugged a stranger
