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Mark Perryman<\/strong> has been reading up on the sport we\u2019ve lost, and what sport might become, as what seems like a never-ending lockdown gradually eases<\/em><\/p>\n Way back when, during the first lockdown, March \u201920, Jonathan Liew wrote a brilliant column<\/a> on small sport vs big sport. What Jonathan meant by \u2018big sport\u2019 was what we watch, for the lucky few as fans in person, for most on the TV. And \u2018small sport\u2019? What we do, a jog, a bike ride, a workout session via Youtube, an open water dip. Can be done on our own, non-competitive, little or no kit required, cheap, and in theory open to just about all. It is \u2018small sport\u2019 that has persisted through the pandemic while \u2018big sport\u2019 has been cancelled, postponed, threatened with financial oblivion, struggled on in a much-reduced version.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n As a handbook for these curious conditions and whatever might follow few will better J\u00fcrgen Martschukat\u2019s timely The Age of Fitness<\/a>.\u00a0 His pioneering argument is that the obsession with individual performance via such \u2018small\u2019 sport is emblematic of, a product of, neoliberalism. Competition, individualism and commodification certainly all play their part. \u00a0But does the potential exist for a sporting counterculture?\u00a0 I would argue it absolutely does \u2013 but first we have to understand sport that cannot be reduced to a simple binary opposition, big bad sport vs small good sport. This book brilliantly provides the framework for just that necessary insight.<\/p>\n The 2021 Tokyo Olympics are pencilled in to mark big sport\u2019s return with a\u00a0 vengeance this summer. Postponed from 2020, the sensible move would have been to keep to the quadrennial Olympic cycle and defer instead to 2024. But commercial interests and lucrative broadcasting rights outweigh any such good sense in the hands of conservative sports administrators. \u2018The Games Must Go On\u2019 becomes the mantra, and the latest edition of Understanding the Olympics<\/a> by\u00a0 John Horne and Garry Whannel is the best possible explanation of where this unwelcome alliance of commerce, broadcasters and conservative officialdom with big sport has come from. \u00a0<\/p>\n That isn\u2019t to say there isn\u2019t much to enjoy about the Olympics, or as I put it in the title of my own book for London 2012 \u2018Why the Olympics\u00a0 Aren\u2019t Good For Us, and How They Can Be<\/a>\u2019, countervailing tendencies exist. Gender is one such way in which what the Olympics represents is challenged, and Jean Williams\u2019 pioneering Britain\u2019s Olympic Women<\/a> is of the \u2018hidden from history\u2019 feminist tradition of uncovering those whom otherwise would be forgotten.<\/p>\n From the first games of the twentieth century via the early postwar and Cold War games to the 1980s and the impact of professionalism Jean Williams tells the story, including \u00a0athlete Audrey Brown at the Nazi Olympics of \u201936, swimmer Margaret Wellington at the \u201948 austerity games, equestrian Pat Smythe and the 1952 Cold War games, and so many more to leave readers questioning why we hadn\u2019t we heard her story before? Uncovering such a story and many others of women Olympians is, eventually, a happy ending.<\/p>\n Bullying, abuse and drugs<\/strong><\/p>\n The big fear is that the modern pressure to succeed at the highest level has no such positive conclusion, instead bullying, abuse and drugs in the chase for gold. Where might this end? The Medal Factory<\/a> by Kenny Pryde achieves the difficult task of reminding readers of the collective joy and national pride as Team GB\u2019s cyclist swept the medals board while not ducking the dark side of the coaching and competitive culture that lay behind all that success.\u00a0 A revealing read. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Pandemic sport, either watching it on the TV or doing it ourselves, has offered many a relief from the horrific daily updates on ever-rising death rates. A snatched moment of normality, win, lose, or draw, the chance to dream. Ian Ridley\u2019s The Breath of Sadness<\/a> was written before Covid yet its incredibly emotional trail around country cricket as a journey through the loss and grief of losing his relatively young wife at the age of 56 to a lethal cancer is sadly very much a book of the current moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Where There\u2019s a Will<\/a> by Emily Chappell shares a similar theme, sport versus grief, in Emily\u2019s case the distraction of endurance sport, ultra distance cycle racing. \u00a0But also the inspiration sport can provide to help untangle the tangled emotions of death for the living \u2013 why them, why not me? \u00a0<\/p>\n Paul Fournel\u2019s\u00a0Need for the Bike<\/a> approaches this emotional role of sport from a different angle , an instant classic when originally published in France , now translated into English, this is a story of the bike as companion, purveyor of agony and ecstasy, the perfect vehicle for a two-wheeled two fingers to everything the pandemic has thrown at us.<\/p>\n Meanwhile in \u201920 what \u2018big sport\u2019 lost was the sense of being there, in the stands,\u00a0 down the pub, watching with mates, and for the lucky victorious crowd, celebrating too. Few missed the latter more than Liverpool fans, a first domestic league championship since the old First Division title of 89-90. Anthony Quinn\u2019s Klopp<\/a> is testament to all that Liverpool achieved in this most unusual of seasons and the manager arguably uniquely well-placed to make this long-awaited achievement possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n Liverpool\u2019s era of nearly-but-not-quite coincided with a failure to find a successful managerial culture to follow the immensely successful \u2018bootroom\u2019 era of\u00a0 Shankly and Paisley era, and to a lesser extent Evans and Dalglish too. Man Utd found the same in the wake of both Busby and Ferguson, and now at Arsenal too, after the Wenger years. While Ars\u00e8ne\u2019s autobiography My Life in Red and White<\/a> isn\u2019t exactly a \u2018kiss and tell\u2019 \u2013 few football autobiographies are that revealing \u2013 there is more than sufficient insight to reveal what Wenger brought to Arsenal and the scale of the problem in coming anywhere close to replacing his contribution.\u00a0<\/p>\n For that missing element in a decent football book, the confessional, Rob Steen has this down to his customary fine writer\u2019s art with The Mavericks<\/a>. Originally published in 1994, now reissued and updated, Rob\u2019s book goes behind the changing room door to reveal the backstory of a generation of 1970s flair players whose ability to entertain on, and off the pitch, was much more about their lawlessness and free spirit than sticking to the plan and playing for the team.<\/p>\n Harry Pearson\u2019s Far Corner, subtitled \u2018a mazy dribble through North-East football\u2019 was also first published in 1994. Rather unexpectedly, almost three decades later, Harry\u2019s written a follow-up called The Farther Corner<\/a>, this time subtitled \u2018a sentimental return to North-East football.\u2019 Of course sentimentalism in and of itself is not enough, although any book that takes in the clubs Newcastle Benfield, Pontefract Collieries, Seaham Red Star\u00a0 and plenty more where they came from will help convince that it is an emotion not to be lightly dismissed in a time of such chronic uncertainty. \u00a0<\/p>\n Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters<\/strong><\/p>\n For an appreciation of all that we have missed for the past year, and a reminder of both from where our football clubs came from and mod\u00a3rn football\u2019s insatiable desire to consume the traditions they helped generate, the books of Daniel Gray are an essential pleasure. Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters<\/a>, telling the story of what Daniel dubbed \u2018England\u2019s football provinces\u2019 \u2013 or in other words life outside the big city clubs \u2013 was the first of what has become a quartet.<\/p>\n The latest Extra Time<\/a> adds a further 50 (50!) \u2018eternal\u2019 delights of\u00a0 mod\u00a3rn football\u00a0 to the 50 he\u2019d uncovered previously in Saturday 3pm<\/a> which just goes to show putting the \u00a3 into \u2018modern\u2019\u00a0 cannot destroy everything we hold dear \u2013 well not yet. \u00a0In between producing these two finely optimistic books Daniel also managed to find \u201850 lost wonders of the beautiful game\u2019 neatly summed up in the book\u2019s title Black Boots and Football Pinks<\/a>. Sadly there will be ample scope post-pandemic for a second volume of these losses too.<\/p>\n A visual memento of what a year not going to games has robbed us of us is superbly provided by British Football\u2019s Greatest Grounds<\/a> compiled by Mike Bayly. I have shelfloads of football photography books, all much treasured, but I was beginning to think the genre might be exhausted by now. Mike\u2019s book confounds that assumption, with photos that give an all-round sense of the stadium located in its surroundings, and sharply observed essays to accompany the photos. As for ordering the must-see 100 grounds with my club Lewes FC\u2019s Dripping Pan at number one, I couldn\u2019t possibly comment! But the \u2018100\u2019 will have readers\u00a0 arguing over the selection and\u00a0 ranking for years to come, and that\u2019s what I call a formula for a great book! \u00a0<\/p>\n In his book Because It\u2019s Saturday<\/a> Gavin Bell defiantly describes lower league football as the game\u2019s \u2018heartlands\u2019 though even here the march of Mod\u00a3rn Football isn\u2019t entirely absent. In which version of Orwellian Newspeak was the fourth division reinvented as \u2018League Two\u2019? For an insight into the commodification of the ability to stop, make and score goals, Daniel Geey\u2019s Done Deal<\/a> is both unrivalled and deeply unsettling.<\/p>\n When Coronavirus struck there were those in the game, as the saying goes, unwilling \u2018to let a good crisis go to waste.\u2019 The most extreme version of this became known as Project Restart, to entrench the wealth and power of the \u2018big\u2019 clubs at the expense of the rest of the Premiership. Jon Berry ingeniously subverts the phrase for the title of his book Project Restart\u00a0 <\/a>to describe the impact of twelve months\u2019 worth of virus and lockdown on a sport that stretches from Sunday league to Premier league, and all points in between. And Berry concludes with the interesting question \u2013 when it\u2019s all over, can football be part of making the post-pandemic world a better place? Let\u2019s hope so.<\/p>\n Fan ownership<\/strong><\/p>\n Long before the current crisis Jim Keoghan established himself as a chronicler of\u00a0 how to turn such hope into reality. First came Punk Football, <\/a>Jim\u2019s spirited account of the rise of fan ownership, a hugely significant movement vital to a better football. Although as recent reversals at Swansea, Portsmouth and Wrexham \u00a0illustrate, the commitment even amongst fans to such a model, when a rich investor comes calling promising success on a plate, \u00a0remains fragile.\u00a0<\/p>\n The continuing need nevertheless for fan ownership is made via the title of Jim\u2019s new book How to Run a Football Club<\/a> \u2013 well it would be with the simple insertion of the word \u2018not\u2019. The argument made in this finest of reads is that whatever level football is enjoyed the \u2018simple love of the sport\u2019 should be paramount, but isn\u2019t.\u00a0 Fan ownership would inevitably mean scaling back the huge operating budgets of the behemoth clubs, and would that be such a bad thing? What precisely would we miss, and what would we gain?<\/p>\n Unlike the supporter ownership movement Football\u2019s response to #BlackLivesMatter, however laudable, was characterised by a corporate version of social responsibility, in this case anti-racism almost entirely divorced from any kind of initiative that could be described as fan-led. When \u2018taking a knee\u2019 becomes an obligatory pre-match ritual rather than how it originated as an act of rebellion, it is increasingly doubtful this is a player-led response either.<\/p>\n Two recent books explore an entirely different situation where sporting officialdom, players and many fans too pitched themselves against anti-racism. Geoff Brown and Christian H\u00f8gsberg\u2019s short book Apartheid is Not a Game<\/a> revisits the notorious 1969 South African Springboks\u2019 rugby tour and South Africa\u2019s 1970 cricket tour of Britain, and the successful efforts by mass protests, disruption and sabotage to stop them. Pitch Battles<\/a> by Peter Hain, one of the key organisers of those protests and his co-author, South African scholar and activist Andr\u00e9 Odendaal, connects sport\u2019s boycotts and protests vital role in the anti-apartheid movement to a wider struggle for an anti-racist sporting culture, bringing the story up to date with both present-day South Africa, lockdown and #BlackLivesMatter. A superb read for resistance and change in \u201921.\u00a0<\/p>\n Racism and English Football<\/a> by Daniel Burdsey points to all the complex, but very necessary, challenges in developing such a response. Until these are faced a truly anti-racist football will remain as far away as it was before last year\u2019s explosion of black resistance.\u00a0 A fine and vital book \u2013 but academic publishers and authors who produce such invaluable books, why no cheap paperback edition?<\/p>\n What might a fans\u2019 resistance movement look like, on race and the extreme\u00a0 commodifying this most fabled of \u2018people\u2019s games\u2019 look like? Three recent books provide an inkling. St Pauli: Another Football is Possible<\/a> by Charles Vi\u00f1as and Natxo Parra connects the history and development of this club as icon of resistance to a wider social movement of change rooted in fandom but not restricted by it. \u00a0<\/p>\n Football from below<\/strong><\/p>\n In Ultras<\/a> Mark Doidge, Radoslaw Kossakowski and Svenja Mintert describe a very particular fan culture that is in turns passionate, orchestrated and performative, global in appeal though to date English fandom has remained largely unaffected, unimpressed even. Digital Football Cultures <\/a>\u00a0edited by Stefan Lawrence and Garry Crawford points to an experience of supporters which today is more genuinely international, following the game online, building fan communities, expressing a cultural ownership of club, team, and players, in a manner not always welcome. A football from below?\u00a0 Possibly.\u00a0<\/p>\n Finding the answer to these questions isn\u2019t easy, but to treat football with the seriousness it deserves means we have to at least try, and the conventions of both the game and politics barely equip us with the ideas and tools the task requires. As the co-founder of Philosophy Football<\/a>, Stephen Mumford\u2019s book Football: The Philosophy Behind the Game<\/a> quite naturally appealed \u00a0to me. It didn\u2019t disappoint with its stimulating mix of the game\u2019s attractions, including beauty, chance, victory and the ideas we observe, but sometimes miss, in the course of ninety minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n For those of a particular inclination David Goldblatt is the Eric Hobsbawm of football writing \u2013 just like the greatest of historians tracing of our society\u2019s past to explain the presen,t David has done the same with football. His latest The Age of Football<\/a> surveys a sport in the grip of neo-colonial power, the crisis of an institutionalised Europeanism, corruption and shifting power politics. In David\u2019s hands context is all and makes for the very best of footballing reads.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The unprecedented support for #BlackLivesMatter across the sporting establishment couldn\u2019t be more different to how sport responded, if at all, to Colin Kaepernick\u2019s original act, which was absolutely of anti-racist resistance. \u00a0And Colin wasn\u2019t alone, as fellow pro American footballer and Superbowl winner Michael Bennett details in his sharply titled book Things That Make White People Uncomfortable<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is a movement of protest, against injustice, opposition to racism and the way black communities are policed . How neatly all of this can co-exist with the most powerful forces in sport seeking to co-opt it remains to be seen.\u00a0 A book that provides the kind of framework to help us not only anticipate such outcomes but shape them too is The Game is not a Game<\/a> by Robert Scoop Jackson, who like Bennett and the peerless Dave Zirin<\/a> all hail from the USA, and all three authors are published by the leftist book publisher Haymarket Books<\/a>. \u00a0So here\u2019s a question \u2013 why doesn\u2019t a sports-obsessed culture like Britain\u2019s produce very much committed leftist sports writing of this sort, published and produced by left-leaning British publishers in cheap, accessible and attractive formats?\u00a0<\/p>\n Tennis from below?<\/strong><\/p>\n There are three examples of what is possible in this respect from three different British independent publishers, and on a sport we might not expect for such an endeavour. First off, from Pluto Press<\/a> we have David Berry\u2019s A People\u2019s History of Tennis<\/a> in which he traces the making of a sport beyond the Pimms, strawberries-and-cream set, constructed instead out of feminism, socialism and migration. \u2018Tennis from below\u2019, who\u2019d have thought it?\u00a0<\/p>\n Next up, from Repeater<\/a>, same sport but a very different\u00a0 approach. Racquet<\/a> is a celebration of the sheer diversity\u00a0 of tennis, edited by David Shaftel and Caitlin Thompson,and \u00a0consisting of articles from the magazine of\u00a0 the same name. The downturn of the late twentieth century boom of tennis as a popular recreational sport, the roots of elitism in tennis versus race, gender and class on and off the court, the sexualising of Maria Sharapova \u2013 here is a range of politicised sports writing to enthuse and inspire others, whatever our sport.<\/p>\n My third example pushes at the boundaries of possibility. Self Made Hero<\/a> has published Czech author Jan Nov\u00e1k\u2019s graphic novel Z\u00e1topek<\/a>, a pioneering combination of words by Jan with the comic-strip art of Jarom\u00edr 99 which creates a mix that both engages the modern reader and informs us of the achievements of one of the true athletic greats. It\u2019s also about the kind of postwar East European\u00a0 communism that framed his achievements on the track. Form and content are combined to produce a truly memorable read.<\/p>\n![\"1](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/1_The_age_of_fitness.jpg\")
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