From the December, 1997, issue of When Saturday Comes as part of the magazine's series on CLASSIC FOOTBALL LITERATURE

Goalkeepers Are Different by Brian Glanville (Puffin paperback, 1971)

Has anyone ever made football into fiction without incurring the laughter of all those who have the vaguest idea that it's three points for a win and that you only play extra time in cup ties? It's a mysterious phenomenon that so many have tried to turn sporting reality into art and, either on pulp or celluloid, have consistently made such a mess of it. Some even believe that the Great Football Novel is still to be written, and no doubt publishers and agents across the country are gasping for the appropriate manuscript to land on their desks so that they can cash in on the current mania for printing unlimited crap with a round-ball connection.

They can give up waiting because such a book has already been written, published and, one suspects, largely forgotten over quarter of a century ago. It's true that Brian Glanville's Goalkeepers Are Different does not, strictly speaking, qualify as ëadult' literature, but then neither do most football books, and if you like a straight football story as much as the next fan then you'll find yourself at the book's end in no less than two or three sittings.

When I was eleven I must have been the only boy in the country playing centre forward for my school and secretly wishing that I was the goalkeeper. It was all because of this book, which turned my head from the trite, monotonous dross I was forcing myself to read in Shoot! every week. I read it seven times (wearing out two copies), which is six more times than any other book I've read in my life. Yet I've never met another soul who has even heard of it.

What makes the book so convincing as a portrayal of life in the professional game is its disingenuous title. Narrator Ronnie Blake - the aspiring keeper who makes his way up to become top stopper at first division Borough United - proclaims in his opening sentence that goalies are "not crazy, they're just different". Yet you couldn't meet a more normal bloke than Ronnie.

He wants to be a pro, like all boys. When as a schoolboy he starts to get spotted by scouts he worries about his future, whether he'll make it, should he continue his education, and so on. There are setbacks, which he overcomes. He likes a couple of beers, but that's it. He observes that on the tube or in Mallorca there are "some nice birds" (thankfully he doesn't see the need to tell us whether he shagged them or not). He's a dead regular geezer who just happens to play in goal. So instead of focusing the book on the alcoholic maverick or the gifted but temperamental serial-shagger, we meet a bloke who is pretty much like ninety per cent of all players - a bloke, who's overwhelming concern in life is doing well in the game of football. Simple, and it works perfectly.

Glanville applies his technical knowledge so realistically that you feel that at some point in his life he actually stood on a goal-line and felt the bulk of Jackie Charlton before him. You sense that you should know who Borough's temperamental Scottish manager Charlie Macintosh is meant to be, but you can't quite pin him down to a real-life figure. And reading accounts of fictitious games against real-life players made me look up in my Rothmans whether there really was a team called Borough United and that, somehow, I had overlooked them for the previous few hundred Saturdays.

This perfectly paced story is now apparently out of print, which is nothing short of a scandal in the current publishing climate. But according to the spirit of the times I'll lend you my copy for a hundred quid.

Ian Plenderleith

Note: As a result of this article Virgin Books republished Goalkeepers Are Different the following year.