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.
