A Football Novel that Works

Fiction about sport is notoriously difficult to pull off, but JL Carr's How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup is weird, funny and plausible enough

Novels or films about sport are rarely convincing, largely because of the narrative imperative to build to a climax which can only ever be one of two things: banal or unrealistic. It would be bold to have a novel end with a chapter describing a routine 2-0 win in the Cup final, even though that’s how a lot of football is. But end it with a 4-3 thriller with three red cards and a missed penalty and, while it would seem brilliant if witnessed live, it feels cheap if made up. Even the denouement of a book as widely praised as Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding feels unsatisfying (no spoilers, but there is a plausible but highly unusual conclusion to the climactic baseball match).

I’ve written a few times in this Substack about my bafflement that more art does not deal with sport, but it’s probably worth stressing that I’m not really talking about plays or films or novels about players or clubs and how they perform on the pitch. For a visual medium, realistic sport is very hard to pull off: kicking a ball may seem simple, but experience soon teaches you how hard it is for an actor to do so in a way that resembles a professional footballer.

And fundamentally sport on the page has an inherent implausibility. Sunderland this season won promotion by scoring in injury-time in three successive games, culminating in a player who supports the club and shares his name with their first league-winning manager scoring the decisive goal with his last touch before leaving for Brighton. It might have induced euphoria, but it’s not that uncommon a sequence of events, and yet a script based on that plot would seem absurdly contrived.

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No, what puzzles me is how rarely sport is the backdrop to novels, films or TV shows in the way that it is in real life, how its metaphorical possibilities are only just beginning to be explored. The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty is a very rare example of a novel and film structured around a sporting symbol.

It’s that fear of contrivance that, for years, had kept me away from How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, even though I’ve read an enjoyed other novels by JL Carr, most notably A Month in the Country. But I needn’t have worried; actual descriptions of football are limited and usually provided by newspaper match reports, written as a series of pastiches. The actual winning of the Cup is almost glossed over. The narrator treats the final at Wembley almost with boredom, noting that “there isn’t a football anthology that doesn’t play that game again” before quoting an obviously absurd passage from the report supposedly written for The Times by Nigel Kelmscott-Jones (who prefers rugby, and is biding his time before his uncle can swing the gig of Paris correspondent for him). The semi-final is even more succinct: “later we went to Wolverhampton and beat the Villa 2-1”. There is no attempt to convey the drama of the occasion – but then even the title tells us what happened. And it’s all the better for it.

In fact, the football aspect throughout is treated with a degree of flippancy. Although precise refences such as that to the League secretary Alan Hardaker suggest a ready knowledge of football, other details seem deliberately vague. Certain rounds are not mentioned at all and, after descriptions of Hartlepool United and Leeds United that feel realistic, the quarter-final is played against a team referred to only as “Manchester” and in the final they face Rangers after “the merging of the two national competitions”. The artifice is highlighted; this is an alternative reality, albeit one not too far removed from our own.

But if the novel’s not really about football, what is it about? The setting, a rural village, is familiar to readers of A Month in the Country, although this one appears to be somewhere in the western Fens rather than in Yorkshire. The narrator is young, melancholic and male with some trauma in his recent past. Where Tom Birkin in A Month in the Country has returned from the First World War, Joe Gidner has been involved in an unexplained incident at theological college.

The village is stocked with eccentrics and grotesques, and to that extent Sinderby probably classes as a comedy, but there is a pervading sadness. The invalid wife of the village schoolmaster, who played six games for Aston Villa before abandoning his career to care for her, dies. Gidner doesn’t get the girl, Ginchy Trigger (heroes: Thomas Hardy and Monty Python), and she gives up her dream of being a journalist to become a parson’s wife in West Africa. Loss and thwarted ambition are everywhere. The only character who really prospers is Mr Fangfoss, the polygamous tell-it-like-it-is local magnate, who becomes a media sensation with a series of unreconstructed pronouncements, but even he seems baffled by his new-found fame.

On its own terms, the football just about works. Dr Kossuth, a Hungarian émigré with a beautiful wife, runs the local school, and is persuaded to turn his remarkably perceptive brain to football. He goes to Filbert Street, Leicester, and returns with a series of postulations, all of which are just the right side of ludicrous. Sinderby choose a new pitch that has a significant lateral slope that will perplex stronger opponents. They wear bright yellow, the better to pick each other out. They learn against high-level opposition to sit deep, absorb pressure and gamble everything on one counter-attack, in which they are aided not only by the former Villa player but by the presence of a centre-forward who played First Division football, became disillusioned and quit the game in his early twenties before being lured back into action at Sinderby. It’s fantasy, but it’s plausible fantasy.

There’s an ownership dispute, problems with crowd control and a hooligan-induced riot, and the media, the football world and rural life are roundly satirised. But what lingers is the elegiac tone, a nostalgia that yearns not even for something great but simply what was. “It is so sad to know that those days, win or lose, can’t return,” Gidner reflects near the end. “Nor those remembered faces be gathered into one place again.”

It’s about loss, and that perhaps is the most penetrating insight of all. When I celebrated Tommy Watson’s winner at Wembley, my first thought after “Fuck me, that’s in!” was that my dad was not there to see it. And as I hugged my mates and the tears rolled down my face, I was weeping – I think – for the future memory of that euphoria, and how it too would soon pass.

“I know what you’re looking for,” Fangfoss says to Gidner at the end. “But it’s gone, and it’ll never come back.”

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How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup by JL Carr can be bought direct form the Quince Tree Press.