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Heroes, Fans and the Nation: Exploring Football in Contemporary Fiction

2012; Routledge; Volume: 29; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09523367.2012.714944

1743-9035

Alexis Tadié,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

Abstract This paper argues that the football trope in literary fiction enables the writer to explore the workings of modernity. In doing so, writers define a place for the reader, which is parallel to the spectator's at a football match. If football may be seen as a form central to our thinking about modernity, the decentring of the analysis brings to light different, splintered, modernities. This study concentrates on English football, as well as on the place of Irish soccer in contemporary Irish culture, or on the writings of the Hungarian novelist Péter Esterházy, who places football at the centre of his writings. This paper concentrates on heroism in football, before turning to an analysis of audiences. Finally, the paper focuses on the relationship between football and the nation in literature. Keywords: footballsoccerreadingBrian GlanvilleDermot BolgerPéter EsterházyDavid PeaceJohn KingView correction statement:Erratum Notes 1. Pinter, The Dumb Waiter, 94–5. 2. ‘I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth,’ Harold Pinter once said, ‘certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either’: The Guardian, December 27, 2008. 3. Horler, Goal!. 4. Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days. On the subject of boys’ literature about sport, see Boyd, Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper. 5. In France, for instance, the Michel Vaillant comics initiated generations of young readers into the complex workings of Formula One racing – and are said to have fostered the vocation of French Formula One driver Alain Prost. 6. In the aftermath of every World Cup since, there have been a number of fans’ accounts of their travels with the England team, such as Moran, We Are Nippon. Winner, Around the World in 90 Minutes presents an interesting variation on the subject, since it is a travelogue which reports on the writer's travels around the world at the time of the 2006 World Cup. For an overview of such literature, see Dart, ‘“Here We Go, Here We Go”’. 7. Woolridge, ‘These Sporting Lives’. 8. Greaves, This One's on Me; Best, Where Do I Go from Here? 9. Hamilton, Gazza Agonistes. 10. Winner, Those Feet. 11. Cf. ‘Fever Pitch is about being a fan. I have read books written by people who obviously love football, but that's a different thing entirely’: Hornby, Fever Pitch, 11–12. 12. King, The Football Factory; Headhunters; England Away. Brimson; Hooligan; Anderson, Casual. On the complexities of the reception of the works of John King as well as on the reception of the film that was made of The Football Factory, see Redhead, ‘This Sporting Life’. 13. See in this issue, Papakonstantinou, ‘The Athletic Body in Classical Athens’. 14. Looking for Eric, directed by Ken Loach (2009). 15. There are a number of variations on the genre of the documentary about famous footballers, some of the more innovative being, for instance, Zidane: a Portrait of the 21st Century, which records all the movements of Zinedine Zidane during a single football match, without ever showing the game. The result is a piece which avoids many of the pitfalls of cinema about football by refusing the drama of a match and by forcing the spectator to focus on an individual player, rather than on the team. In the same vein, one may mention Maradona by Kusturica (directed by Emir Kusturica, 2008) a film which, unlike the other two films mentioned above, is a genuine biographical documentary about the Argentinian player. 16. Hamilton, Gazza Agonistes, 183–4. 17. The Olympian is for instance about a runner. 18. Of particular interest here is Goalkeepers are Different (1971) which concentrates on the fascination exerted by goalkeepers. 19. One would want to pause and think here of all the great heroes of sport whose downfall was also brought about by the nature of the sport itself, be it the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs as in the case of a number of cyclists, Marco Pantani or Laurent Fignon, the contrast between permanent glory and solitary retirement as in the case of Björn Borg and others, or indeed the simple self-destructive mode that was enhanced by the glory of sport. 20. Glanville, The Dying of the Light, 80. 21. Ibid., 95. 22. Peace, The Damned United; The Damned United, directed by Tom Hooper (2009). 23. Echenoz, Running. 24. Peace, The Damned United, 6. 25. Ibid., 84. 26. Ibid., 347. 27. Hamilton, Gazza Agonistes, 5. 28. On cricket and literature see Tadié, ‘The Fictions of (English) Cricket’. This is of course a generalisation – there is a tradition in football literature which connects directly with the public-school novel, in the wake of Tom Brown, and which concentrates on the game on the pitch. Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) offers long descriptions of football matches at the school, which were used to great effects in Ken Loach's film of the novel, Kes (1969) 29. Hooliganism was indeed the central problem of English football in the 1970s and 1980s with violent fights taking place at many stadiums. It was organised around gangs of supporters and was only controlled at the end of the 1990s. 30. King, England Away, 104. 31. King, The Football Factory, 31. 32. Ibid,, 63. 33. Priestley, The Good Companions, 5–6. 34. King, The Football Factory, 155. 35. Ibid., 208. 36. Ibid., 6. 37. Ibid., 52. 38. Ibid., 125. 39. Ibid., 61. Or again: ‘Derby may be fuck all when it comes to football, but they’ve got a few faces prepared to do the business’: ibid., 252. 40. Cf. King, Skinheads. 41. King, The Football Factory, 210. 42. Ibid., 13. The parallel between sport and war, and in particular between football encounters with Germany and the two world wars is ubiquitous, including in supporters’ songs: ‘Two world wars, one World Cup’, as if, in a football context, English supporters could only view Germany through the superimposition of football (the 1966 World Cup) and war. 43. Other films have portrayed this subculture of football, such as Alexander's Green Street (2005) or This Is England, the 2006 film directed by Meadows. But the reality of skinhead influence on the culture of football must be qualified. There are a number of studies of this phenomenon, such as Back, Crabbe and Solomos, ‘Beyond the Racist/Hooligan Couplet’. See also Hughson and Poulton, ‘“This is England”’, in particular 517: ‘[O]ur concern is that by riding on the back of a well-established moral panic, initiatives such as England fans keep alive the “folk-devil” of the extremely outdated skinhead football hooligan stereotype. In turn, such promotion abets a counter-ethnocentric marginalization whereby the “rough”, male, white working class is perceptually labelled as deviant – symbolically guilty until proven otherwise.’ On fan culture in general, in a comparative perspective, see Finn and Giulanotti, Football Culture. 44. Mauvignier, In The Crowd. 45. King, England Away, 60. 46. King, England Away, 251. 47. ‘What has made sport so uniquely effective a medium for inculcating national feelings, at all events for males, is the ease with which even the least political or public individuals can identify with the nation as symbolized by young persons excelling at what practically every man wants, or at one time in life has wanted, to be good at. The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people. The individual, even the one who cheers, becomes a symbol of his nation himself’: Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 143. 48. This of course refers to the Republic of Ireland. On football and Ireland, see also Doyle, ‘Republic is a Beautiful Word’. On the relationship between football and nationalism in Northern Ireland, see for instance Hassan, ‘A People Apart’. 49. Bolger, In High Germany, 37. 50. Ibid., 42–3. 51. Ibid., 52. Cf. Bolger, The Parting Glass, 8: ‘I have learnt my father's lesson: you should never return, but I can’t fully let go of Ireland though. In dreams I’m still here and every time they play soccer I find a television. Those eleven men in green – twinning the accents from the sons of those who stayed and those forced to leave – feel like the only Ireland I still belong to.” 52. Henry provided for Gallas the goal which put Ireland out of the World Cup after handling the ball twice in the six-yard box. A Google search on the words ‘Ireland France Thierry Henry’ yielded 2,810,000 results on 16 April 201. 53. ‘Da: the absence in my life, the man forced to leave his family to seek work in an English car plant. All my uncles have left and taken their children with them, but Da is stubborn. Da wants me to grow up with an Irish accent under an Irish flag’: Bolger, The Parting Glass, 3. 54. Ibid., 15. 55. ‘Theo wants me to invest my statutory redundancy in more Anglo Irish shares. Their price keeps plummeting, based on false rumours, he says. I should snap them up with balls of steel while money I invested for Dieter's future disappears as Irish shares keep tumbling. Do I ride the market or cut my losses. I don’t know what to do. I’m filling in job application forms and not even getting replies. I’m checking the stock market every half hour, trying to stop calculating how much we’ve lost. I’m not sleeping: the walls of the apartment growing in on me. I’m in a limbo of CVs and the sort of queues I left Ireland to avoid twenty-five years ago’: ibid., 29). 56. Ibid., 35 57. Bolger, ‘Author's Note’. 58. Bolger, The Parting Glass, 31. 59. Esterházy, Not Art. The novel is centred on the figure of the mother, with whom the narrator discusses time and again the offside rule, but the defining moment in the book is the visit to the great hero of Hungarian football, Puskás. 60. The book is as yet not translated into English. I have used and quoted from the French translation, Voyage au bout des seize mètres. The translations from French into English are mine. 61. The event is celebrated from a – needless to say – different perspective in the immensely popular Das Wunder von Bern [The Miracle of Bern] (2006), a film by Sönke Wortmann. 62. Esterházy, Voyage, 136. 63. He alludes indirectly to the famous controversy about the fact that the Germans players might have been doped. 64. Ibid., 36. 65. Ibid., 149. 66. Ibid., 151.