Friday, October 23, 2009
How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup
Just before the 2002 World Cup in Japan I attended a course at Birkbeck College in London entitled Football, Culture and Society, a series of 6/8 lectures on covering footballs role in community and culture. Not only was it an excellent course but it also gave participants a chance to meet the likes of Professor John Williams (from the Centre for Football Research, Leicester University) and Mark Perryman (football activist and writer and convener of the London England Fans supporters' group).
The series of handouts from the lecturers included several pages of recommended reading (which I have reproduced here, here, here, here, here and here for anyone that’s interested) and I’ve been working my way through the list every since.
Up until that time I’d given up on finding any half decent writing on the game (Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch excepted) after starting and stopping after a few pages on at least a dozen of footballers autobiographies. Nobby Stiles’ autobiography for instance. How can the story of a man who played for one of England top clubs – winning World Cup and European Cup medals in the process – be converted in to two-hundred or so utterly tedious pages.
Anyway, this links very untidily with a book that is not on the list, which I picked up on my recent holiday in Lincolnshire, the truly wonderful How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup by JL Carr (1975). Set in a fenland village it tells the story of how the local amateur side – guided by an ex-patriot Hungarian academic and two retired football league players – not only reach the FA Cup Final, but win it in style with victory over Glasgow Rangers. Is it believable? “Depends on whether you want to believe”, says the author in the introduction. The title is a bit of a spoiler but if fantasy, David v Goliath or whimsy are you’re thing then you should try and get hold of a copy.
posted by chevblue at 4:54 pm
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