Striker,
by Hunter Davies (1992)
IN THIS satire on the football autobiography, Hunter Davies highlights the 1990s clash between the old values of traditional working-class football and the game which had suddenly become fashionable again and which was attracting new legions of middle-class fans.
The central character is Joe Swift, whose upbringing was the stuff of "TV documentaries where they eat their babies, keep pigeons in the bath and have coal butties for breakfast": he lived in "the worst council estate on the worst estate in the whole of County Durham". Davies deliberately creates a stereotypical character; Joe symbolises every ordinary boy plucked from a deprived area to go on to stardom.
On a satirical level, parts of Striker work well; Davies hits many of the targets in modern football. He points out some of the arbitrary conventions of the football autobiography that the reader often takes for granted; after an interchange between characters, Swift says, "I've just made up that conversation, this minute, but then you do, when you're writing your autobiography. No one takes notes at the time. No one can possibly remember, word for word".
Davies' satire on stereotypical attitudes towards regional accents is effective; however, other aspects of Joe Swift's character do not always ring true. The book opens with a well-chosen quotation from Chekov, which outlines the nature of the autobiography: "I can write only from memory. I never write directly from life. The subject must pass through the sieve of my memory, so that alone what is important or typical remains as a filter".
Yet the sense of Swift as a realistic character is constantly undermined by self-conscious references to his both his working-class origins and his obvious intelligence. In one of the spoof letters, Swift himself says "Just kidding, Cyril Knowles. You was brilliant"; one wonders whether someone who quotes Chekov would write ungrammatically, even in irony.
In Joe Swift's character Davies aims to combine the notion of high and low culture, but it is doubtful that the two can be reconciled. For, both are referred to in such an ironic, often sarcastic, tone, that Joe Swift himself merely becomes an empty collection of various stereotypes associated with football. This quite damagingly suggests that the idea of the intellectual footballer (and the intellectual football fan) is something which cannot be taken seriously.
Review by Sam Hawcroft
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