Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is a novel for teenagers, really, about a guy who becomes a professional goalkeeper. As a teenager I must have read it five or eight times, and I’ve subsequently met other people who’ve had that experience too. It was a book about what you always dreamed of, of being a professional footballer, but it was rendered with grittiness and accuracy and it just has the pace of a really good novel.
Your last book is Goalkeepers are Different, by Brian Glanville.
This is again a bit of a cult book. Brian Glanville is the legendary football journalist, he’s been doing it for, I think, 60 years – his age is never clear to me, but he must be in his late 70s now. He ghosted the autobiography of a famous pre-war footballer when he was 17 and has been in the business ever since. And he’s written wonderful histories – he’s a very, very fine writer and he also wrote some novels, partly about British Jewish families. But Goalkeepers are Different is a novel really for children/young people, about a guy who becomes a professional goalkeeper. Like Dunphy’s book it has some of the bitterness and frustrations and lack of glamour – and it’s just a wonderfully rendered novel.
As a teenager I must have read it five or eight times, and I’ve subsequently met other people who’ve had that experience too. It was a book about what you always dreamed of, of being a professional footballer, but it was rendered with grittiness and accuracy and it just has the pace of a really good novel. Glanville is a great writer and I sense that this book will outlive his nonfiction writings, as good as they are.
It captures both the glamour and the unglamorous side?
Yes, the jealousies inside the team, the conflict with the manager, but also the great moments – the novel, of course, ends with the keeper on the brink of winning an FA Cup Final. It’s a very realistic portrayal of the dream, and the dream isn’t entirely shattered – it has a very good balance between grittiness and happiness.
Are goalkeepers different?
That’s one of the football clichés, isn’t it? And the book is really a demolition of clichés, because it says actually this is what it’s really like. And the hero is a very ordinary young man, he doesn’t have flights of fancy, he’s not a remarkable person in any way. He’s a very difficult person to make the main character of a novel, because there’s nothing very exciting or interesting about him. And the novel succeeds partly because he’s a very convincing young professional footballer, he doesn’t have much experience of the world, he enters this universe he doesn’t know well… No, I think, based on this book, goalkeepers are not different. He’s a very ordinary person.
Lastly, we’re not supposed to talk about your own book, but I can’t help but ask – why does England always lose?
In our book we crunch numbers, and we say that obviously one very important aspect of predicting whether a country will do well is population size. England always compares itself to Italy, to France and Germany and to Brazil. But Italy and France are somewhat larger, Germany is much larger, and Brazil is four times the size of England’s population. 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? In our book we reckon they should be about the tenth best team in the world, and that’s about what they usually are – in fact, England slightly outperforms. It’s just that the expectations are completely wrong, and that’s because we invented the game. But inventing the game doesn’t win you World Cups 150 years later…
And is that why Holland never wins either?
Holland’s got 16 million inhabitants – it would be astonishing if Holland won the World Cup. But Holland is a massively outperforming country. It’s a small population, but like England it’s wealthy, and wealth is a predictor of success (Brazil being the exception, a poor country that wins). Also, like England, Holland has been playing football a long time. That’s another predictor of success – how long has your national team been playing, how many games has your national team played? But there are quite a few countries that have been playing football a long time. So Holland has actually massively outperformed and it’s astonishing that it has ever got close to winning the World Cup and been in two finals.
The book is all about crunching numbers?
We hope it’s not as dry as that – but we do look at the data to come up with new truths about football, fascinating truths, I would say.
So who is going to win the World Cup?
In the book we show that Spain is not just the best team in the world right now, but possibly the best national football team ever, based on their results. But I have a secret hunch it might be Argentina…
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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.
