Players Number Six: The Ballad of Pork and Mutton FC

This is a comic and fictitious tale, set in the 1970s, of a failing and depleted pub team playing in a low level league run by a football administration that takes itself far too seriously. With only four players left, Pork and Mutton FC decide to seek redemption by carrying on for another season in Division 2 of the Restaurants and Business Houses League (North), but need a new sponsor, players and a manager. Their recruitment search leads to tensions between themselves and the league administrators not dissimilar to a cold war, given the pub is in West Shields and the league HQ in East Shields.

Sunday morning football provides the humble background for a range of characters and their exaggerated, often ridiculous, at times absurd, but always hilarious, storylines to enter and develop the narrative over an eventful thirty game season. It has always been a ‘funny old game’ especially at its non-elite margins, buried deep below an increasingly serious soccer pyramid, and the book tries to capture this vital essence.

The main character is Simon Washington, a white collar council employee, who largely takes over running the team alongside the new sponsor Max Mortimer, an enterprising funeral director, and his Goth-like son Doug, as well as long suffering pub landlord Fred. While the few original players make up the backbone of the team, with one, Roger Chamberlain getting himself into a number of fraught situations, significant others enter as new playing recruits or part of the opposition. Chief amongst the first are Owen Bigalow, builder by day and Roy Orbison impersonator by night, who keeps goal while being also obsessed with the number 0 and the letter O, along with the disloyal Jonathan Cruft and his faithful dog Eusebio providing scandal and betrayal. The Tripolini brothers, triplets working in their mother’s Italian deli, make a case for the defence while up front Aussie Ever Reddy is better able to hold on to his place in the team than onto his hairpiece. There are dodgy referees and even dodgier club sponsors, such as the shady Chinese businessman, and spot the ball and pools winner, Mr Wu. Greeks, Germans, and Poles make more than just a fleeting footballing entrance, alongside miners, lawyers, chefs (whether commie or commis) and catering students, populating some of the teams that they face. Even a dishevelled football scout and a lonely giant of a man carrying two buckets (named Faith and Hope) help in this search for collective redemption.

It is intended as a humorous and wistful ballad of sorts where its leading colourful players are simply caught up in the magic, love and poetry of actively participating in a sport, not of kings, but of the everyman. At a time, and a level, where there were no such specific terms as false nines since all positions were equally fallacious residing largely in the imaginations rather than the abilities of its participants, when reality could still be trumped by dreams, and the game in its playing made fantasy footballers out of all of us.

It is a journey where people learn about themselves as well as others with twists, turns and surprises along the way. There are revelations aplenty, especially in the climactic final chapter. The message of the book is positive and uplifting so that even within this humble world, and crummy league, humans not only stumble and err but also rise and continue to dream. While the team’s adventures and playing are often a tour de farce rather than a tour de force ‘the beautiful game’ always somehow delivers, including providing a sense of belonging and identity.