The best football book ever?

I spent a lot of years as the sports editor at The Morning Star, learning a number of lessons. While I might have been the editor – I decided what went on the pages, what we covered, commissioned where possible etc – I had a staff of, err, me, plus some willing volunteers who did reports and took photos at sporting events because they wanted to for the fun of it and I could get them access.

I like to think that I made a small impact: when I left, I received a £10 M&S gift token from one reader to thank me, so I can’t have been all bad. Note – I spent the token on a chunky, green sweater, which did me very good service for many years.

But before that, I used to pen a regular column at the end of each week – Kendal’s Korner– which was essentially a 1,500-word analysis of whatever big sports story had dominated the week just ending. I even got a commendation as best newcomer in the UK Sports Journalism Awards one year (the framed certificate is now so faded I can’t make out the date) for exactly these columns. Which given the lack of resources I had, is amazing.

 

Indeed, that led directly to freelance shifts at the Sunday Indpendent, inputting the football results on Saturdays, living off the Indy canteen’s chips and editor Simon Kellner telling me (occasionally) “she’s back!” when I'd call out the correct answer to one of his shouted sports questions to the room.

 

It also means that I was the first and, as far as I know, the most recent Morning Starjournalist to receive any accolade for writing. The Other Half won one for his football tips. We still have the glass trophy, and he still mourns not trusting himself enough to actual take a punt.

 

But one thing I got no shortage of in those times was sports books to review.

 

I interviewed 400m hurdles Olympic champion Sally Gunnell shortly after her 1994 autobiography, Running Tall, came out. She was rather grumpily offended that her views – not least on the drug testing regime in athletics – had been censored into utter blandness. She had more than a point.

 

But setting that aside, there was a widespread problem … blandness. Few sports books were allowed to shatterany sort of illusion. Most ‘autobiographies’ were ghosted and bland beyond belief (as well as not being very well written). Ghosted is not, of itself, bad, but combined with blandness … well, I’m sure you get the gist.

 

I haven’t voluntarily read a sports book in years.

 

And then, a few weeks ago, I picked up Pirates, Punks and Politics by Nick Davidson, from Stanchion Books, which now has a regular stall on my local Saturday market.

The book in question is about second-tier Bundesliga ‘kult’ club St Pauli. It’s part personal memoir of a disillusioned English fan rediscovering the ‘real’ football experience again in Hamburg, but it’s also a history of the club itself.

 

The history is fascinating. I already knew that St Pauli has a big following in Hamburg among the local sex workers; that it has a reputation for fans being anarchist in terms of political ideology, of being deeply anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-misogynist and pro-LGBT+ people.

 

Davidson is not a professional writer and, while I’d still recommend it as a read, it isn’t the best written book you’ll engage with.

 

However, it led me to Uli Hesse’s Tor: The Story of German Football. The fourth, fully revised edition, was released earlier this year.

Now, I’ve read Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy (I still have my treasured copy of a book both sporting and intellectual) so I do quite like my sports books to be grown up.

 

But Tor! is absolutely superb. Written in English by a writer for whom that is not his first language, Hesse aimed absolutely at the English language market to tell a story not generally known over here.

 

Speaking to 'here' (Hackney, east London) – The Other Half is not really a fan of Association Football, but of Rugby League, but I found myself laughing out loud and then having to quote to him in explanation, usually, for him to then laugh out loud too.

 

In case you didn’t know, Germans really do have a sense of humour!

 

It is an extraordinary story – and told in an absolutely, pitch-perfect and wonderful way. I can’t think of a better book about football that I have ever read. I probably haven’t enjoyed one as much since reading Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Such an informative read, combined with such fun.

 

Hesse never ducks the big questions – ie football in the Nazi and DDR eras – but so much else is just a hoot, often told in a wonderfully deadpan fashion.

 

Best football book in years? Absolutely!

Best sports book in years? Absolutely!

 

It’s worth noting that Davidson has waived all monies from Pirates, Punks and Politics to go to St Pauli fan projects.

 

So y’know what? Buy and read them both! And y’know what … do it from a tiny, indy bookseller like Stanchion.

 

 

Thousands of years of stories – wonderfully told

Hardly 3,000 years in the making, but it took The Other Half and I three attempts to finally get to see George Miller’s latest film, after an encounter with a bad egg and then, a wait for a plumber.

But third time lucky, we made it to the cinema today – and thank goodness we did.

 

Based on a 1994 short story by AS Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Ey, this is about British scholar Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), an apparently happy loner who ‘suffers’ from an overactive imagination.

 

In Istanbul to address a conference on mythology and storytelling, she buys a small glass bottle from an old store. Back in her hotel room, it breaks and lets free a djinn – an invisible being with magical powers originating in early Islamic Arabian religious systems – who says he can grant her three wishes.

 

Indeed, if she does that, it will free him too; in his case, to return to the realm of his own kind.

 

However, there are conditions attached – one cannot, for instance, ask for immortality.

 

But Binnie is well enough versed in stories to know that the ‘grant-you-X-wishes’ trope is one of warning. Because wishes and desires have a nasty habit of having consequences – almost all initially unseen.

 

And as she refuses to make a wish, so she begins a conversation with Djinn (Idris Elba) about his own life experiences that will have a profound impact on both of them.

 

It’s not the sort of film you might expect from Mr Mad Max himself … although then again, Miller has also made the utterly charming Babe pig movies and the spikey The Witches of Eastwick, so what, precisely, would one expect?

 

The result is many, many things, with many, many threads. It touches on colonialism – including the colonialism of bodies – and on English exceptionalism. These are linked. It doesn’t shy from the embarrassment of earlier ages seeing children as sexually available through marriage – ie child abuse.

And of course, there is the nature of story and mythology. It’s never entirely clarified that Binnie’s experiences are real and not simply her own, self-declared, overactive imagination.

It is also good to see a work of art that doesn't play to the current prescriptions that everyone should have X friends and, if they don't, that's not 'Normal' or healthy. 

 

It is beautiful to watch – Miller’s evocation of an ancient, mythological Middle Eastern world is simply sumptuous. There’s also a very, very cute take on gender privilege, in Djinn’s retelling of the first encounter between Solomon and Sheba.

 

This is beautiful film; a very thoughtful film that inspires thought. A wonderfully acted one too.

 

Not quite a two-hander – but almost – Swinton and Elba are both superb in roles that one might not usually expect of either. Miller’s direction is wonderful. It’s provocative – but in a good way. Simply put, I cannot recommend this highly enough. If it’s available locally, do go and see it.

 

See how they murder – a masterclass

It’s late 1952 and the cast and creatives of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap are celebrating reaching an incredible 100 performances. 

But behind the scenes, there is conflict about a contracted Hollywood film version – the author having decreed that not even filming should occur until at least six months after the original stage production has closed.

Then one of those involved is murdered and the game is afoot.

Enter, stage left (but not pursued by a bear), come world weary Inspector Stoppard and policing ingenue Constable Stalker to take on this celebrity murder case, shorn of other resources as a serial killer stalks London.

 

See How They Run is, on one level, a very clever conceit in terms of bringing the play to the screen – even while it still runs in London’s West End, given that Christie really did decree that that could never happen until it had closed its initial run, but it is also much more than that.

 

It's a gloriously arch look at the tropes of a certain type of crime entertainment. Incredibly clever – but not smugly so – there are countless little puzzles and references for the audience to solve and spot.

 

It won’t detract if you don’t get them, but as an example, Inspector Stoppard’s name might well reference playwright Tom Stoppard – not least when one character describes the murder victim as a woman-chasing “hound, Inspector”: see Stoppard’s one-act play, The Real Inspector Hound.

 

Equally, is Constable Stalker a reference to John Stalker, the late deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester? The film takes pot shots at what could, in effect, be called ‘policing for honours’ and, thereby, The Establishment as a whole.

 

All this pretty much guarantees that I will watch this again. And again. And possibly even again. A few hours after seeing it, my brain is on a kind of churn with all this and I suggest that it’s not simply a bit of ‘light entertainment’ to be dismissed easily.

 

It’s beautifully paced. Mark (My Life in Film and Flaked on TV) Chappell’s first film is witty, intelligent and very enjoyably twisty. Jamie D Ramsey’s cinematography is great and the editing – including the use of split screens – is so clever given the context.

 

All this should tell you  automatically that Tom George’s direction is pretty much nailed on.

 

In terms of performances, Sam Rockwell as Stoppard and Saoirse Ronan as Stalker are great – and their pairing works really well in creating a clumsy relationship. Adrien Brody is in top-notch form as the film producer. But the cast is good from top to bottom.

 

There are no weak links – and I commend Charlie Cooper for so wonderfully channelling Bill Nighy in one scene in particular.

 

See this if you can – it’s a joy on oh, so many levels.