Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool may yet have a say in the matter, true, but Manchester City look set to win a sixth Premier League title since the club was bought by Abu Dhabi royals in 2008. Hard to imagine any of that making sense at the turn of the century, when City were out of the top flight and managed by Kevin Keegan, who could be found blaming yet another cup exit on a 27th-minute red card from the referee. “People should write about Uriah Rennie,” he fumed to reporters after the match, “because that’s what he wants.”
One imagines the glee with which Ashley Hickson-Lovence seized on those words for the epigraph to Your Show, a stirring, stylistically unorthodox novel that sets out to do exactly that by fictionalising the life of Rennie, the Premier League’s first black referee. Told as a montage of urgent second-person scenes, it’s a nervy psychodrama fuelled by ambition, envy, doubt and ego, cutting from his Jamaican boyhood and 1970s youth on a tough Sheffield estate to the highs and lows of a trailblazing career forged in a new era of professionalism for officials amid the sport’s sudden, Sky-fuelled glamour of the 1990s.
Hickson-Lovence re-creates all the talking points that launched a thousand phone-ins, from the time Rennie broke FA protocol to yank Roy Keane away from an opponent he was about to wallop to the red card he gave Alan Shearer, on the striker’s 100th appearance for Newcastle: the first in a series of run-ins that left the England captain (as fond of an elbow as Rennie was of a card) mischievously wondering aloud whether the referee was pursuing a vendetta.
