At the back of Jilly Cooper’s new novel, set in the world of football, lurks a quite extraordinary roll call of acknowledgments. Tony Adams, Alex Ferguson and Kenny Dalglish are all here, and so is Howard Wilkinson, the chairman of the League Managers Association, who showed Cooper around the FA’s national football centre in Staffordshire, and introduced her to the England manager, Gareth Southgate. Alas, she doesn’t say what she and Southgate discussed on that great day; having read Tackle!, I detect that she has strong views on the quality of the catering in football boardrooms, so perhaps they talked avidly of flaky pastry. But she does note that “many years later”, Southgate was kind enough to send her a signed England shirt, together with a note congratulating her on having finally finished writing her book.
Was this novel – her 18th – a bit of a slog for Cooper? My hunch is that it was. As dogged and as enthusiastic as her research may have been, football isn’t exactly her natural territory; there is, I’m afraid, a certain amount of unintentional comedy to be found in her account of the beautiful game. (“Each team would now have five kicks and the team which scored the most penalties from these five would win,” she writes, not-very-excitingly, of a match-clinching penalty shootout in her novel’s climactic moments.) Seven long years after her last book – its subject was flat racing – this one, if the gossip is to be believed, was further held up by sensitivity readers and a publisher who wanted “more sex”. And yes, the mind does rather boggle at the thought of 86-year-old Cooper having to balance the impatient demands of both.
Personally, I found sex, even after the best efforts of her editor, to be a bit thin on the ground in Tackle!. Sure, Cooper gives us the occasional “oral tribute” – in 2023, the men, as well as the women, go in for such downward scurrying – and a character called Emma Stanton-Harcourt, whose refusal to shave her pubic hair betrays her upper-crust status to anyone who sees her sans underwear, does have a few wild nights with Ryan Edwards, the manager of the club that has just signed her son, Harry, to its academy (she’s delighted: so much cheaper than Eton). But otherwise, we’re in rather cosy, not to say lacklustre, territory here. The trouble is that Cooper simply will not give up on Rupert Campbell-Black, the gorgeous, pouting star of Riders and several subsequent Rutshire-set novels, and he’s in his 60s now, with a wife, Taggie, who’s having treatment for breast cancer. Basically, he’s not much in the mood for shenanigans, sexual or otherwise.
But, wait! What on earth is Rupert Campbell-Black, ex-world showjumping champion, hugely successful owner, trainer and breeder, and a former Conservative minister for sport, doing in a novel about football? You might well ask. It is a bit improbable to find him the owner of Searston Rovers, a small, struggling club in League One (in Cooper’s hands, League One is a kind of Cotswolds super-league, the doings of its plucky sides reported on in breathless detail by Rupert’s ghost writer, Dora Belvedon, who’s somehow permitted to be both Searston’s press officer and a reporter for the Cotchester Times). But needs must. Bianca, his adopted daughter, is married to a star striker, Feral Jackson, who’s playing for an Australian side when the book begins. In essence, he buys a share in Searston the better to bring her home to Taggie: Feral will be its next big signing.
Needless to say, Searston won’t struggle for long once Campbell-Black is in charge: up the tables they rise, eventually bagging themselves a place in the Premier League, and thus the opportunity to play in the Champions League against, er, Union Beethoven (a German side, natch). Cooper – sorry, I mean Campbell-Black – has loads of ideas for improving Searston, for its fans as well as its players. Under his eye, the crowd gets to watch his favourite horses and dogs prancing on the pitch before kick-off; the team comes on to the theme from Black Beauty; and freshly made lemon dribble cake (get it?) is served in the boardroom (also, Taggie’s very good ratatouille). It’s as if the Women’s Institute is running the show – if, that is, the Women’s Institute had £40m going for an impromptu shareholder buyout.
Campbell-Black raises this sum, not by selling blackcurrant jam, but by flogging a Stubbs from his beautiful ancestral home, Penscombe Court. Eventually, though, he’s defeated by sheer cashflow – football is impossibly expensive, even once you’ve sacked Gemini Coates, your club’s left-leaning mental health coach (Campbell-Black doesn’t believe in mental health) – and he has to get a loan from Genghis Tong, “a millionaire aeroplane manufacturer from Hong Kong… whose sweet son Bao had done work experience in the [livery] yard a year ago”.
Hmm. One imagines that the sensitivity readers, if indeed they existed, were in the end just as frustrated by Cooper as her supposedly sex-fixated editors – though if this was the case, I can’t sympathise at all. When everyone’s a stereotype, no one is. Tackle! isn’t, by a long shot, Cooper’s best book; the ball, you might say, doesn’t quite find the back of the net. I was tempted, at moments, to blow the whistle on it. But on I pressed, dashing towards full time. There’s still something infectiously joyful and funny about her particular brand of very English writing: it comes with a kindliness and a silliness that is beginning to feel to me quite painfully nostalgic.
• Tackle! by Jilly Cooper is published by Bantam (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
