Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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Pete Davies really started off English football literature. He was a little known novelist, and the then English manager Bobby Robson said, ‘Why don’t you spend the 1990 World Cup as a sort of writer-in-residence for the England team? It’s an account of the hysterical football industry at its most hysterical moment during a World Cup. And even 20 years on, you feel some of the tension and the excitement of the World Cup: will England do it; won’t they?
Tell me more about Pete Davies’s All Played Out. It’s about the English team going to the Italia 90 World Cup...
This book is just being rereleased now, 20 years on, as One Night in Turin and it’s also been turned into a film. Pete Davies really started off English football literature, and when I was going around London publishers in 1991, trying to sell them my first football book, people said to me, ‘Oh yes, we know football books sell, because Pete Davies wrote this very good book called All Played Out.’ Before Davies, ‘football book’ was sort of an oxymoron, and then Davies made it happen.
Davies was a little-known novelist, and the then English manager Bobby Robson said, ‘Why don’t you spend the 1990 World Cup, as a sort of writer-in-residence for the England team? And you can live in the hotel, and have complete access to the players, and we’ll shut out the nasty journalists.’ Davies got the players to trust him, and he interviewed them seriously and sensitively, as if they were sentient human beings – which at the time nobody suspected footballers were. He also ventured out into the World Cup, he got out of the hotel, he met hooligans and other fans, and tabloid journalists – there are all these wonderful character portraits in the book. It’s an account of the hysterical football industry at its most hysterical moment during a World Cup. And even 20 years on, you feel some of the tension and the excitement of the World Cup: will England do it, won’t they? And it’s a book that has lived on and survived. And interestingly, like Nick Hornby, Pete Davies never wrote about football again. This was the book he wanted to write, and then he moved on.
It’s quite gripping, I gather from the reviews.
It’s gripping and it’s written in a very sort of populist, laddish style, but it works. The characters make it work, and the setting of Italy during the World Cup. It doesn’t matter that that World Cup is now history.
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Simon Kuper is a Brit of South African origin. He writes a column for the Financial Times on sport and is the author of Football Against the Enemy, Ajax, The Dutch, The War, and Why England Lose. One important aspect of predicting whether a country will do well is population size, Kuper says. England always compares itself to Italy, to France and Germany and to Brazil. But if you look at England coldly from afar, it’s half a mid-sized island. Why do we think England should win the World Cup – it’s ludicrous? They should be about the tenth best team in the world, so, in fact, England slightly outperforms.
