Dark matter

FOOTBALL NOVEL

In autumn 2000, towards the end of Kevin Keegan’s England managerial reign, I arranged for Vincent Kelly – sports editor of the Liverpool Echo in the mid-1970s – to write about his experience of working on a column with the then Liverpool player.

The article was for my employer at the time, Sportal, one of the early football websites then riding the brief wave of the dotcom boom. Kelly had been my newspaper journalism lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, a native Liverpudlian with a twinkle in his eye,who combined warmth with authority. The Keegan story was one he had related in class. It is an article I rediscovered, by coincidence, not long after Keegan’s death in July. It served as an illustration of his decency. As Kelly explained, he agreed to give Keegan a weekly column on a trial basis, offering him 12 columns for a fee of £ 10 each. “I insisted that Keegan really had to earn that £10,” wrote Kelly. “He had to write the column himself, not rely on an Echo journalist to do it for him. Keegan earned it. His ideas were his own and he came in with the column already written. Keegan, he added, “wanted to write about fashion as well as football” and his output was “very different from the usual stuff about groin strains”.

Such was his commitment that Keegan sent one column by airmail while on England duty yet, before long, he was being tempted with a £500 per column offer from a national newspaper. There was still one week left of the 12-week trial so he told the national that “he would not write for them unless he could write for the Echo too”. Kelly duly converted the column into a regular training guide titled “A ball, a wall and Kevin Keegan”.

The story did not end there. A few years later, at the end of the 1970s, Kelly received a phone call from Keegan, by now a superstar. “You owe me a column,” said Keegan. “You promised me 12 and you only got 11.” Thus he went into the newspaper’s office the next day and, as Kelly recounted, “poured out revelations that would have cost a national thousands of pounds to get exclusively”.

Integrity mattered to Keegan, and it matters also to Kelly whose debut novel, Dreadnought , is notable for depicting the depressing absence of it in the world of football. Now 93, Kelly self-published the novel last year, drawing on his experiences with footballers from a time when local reporters travelled on the team bus – as well as from a career in journalism in which he was associate editor of the Echo and editor of the Birmingham Post .

His novel’s central figure is a footballer, Andrew Alexander, a legend of the fictional City Football Club. It begins with an encounter in 1945 and ends in 1995 not long after the advent of the Premier League. The book’s back sleeve promises “greed, media manipulation and grubby backdoor deals”. To that you can add racism and the questionable role of the authorities in influencing how the truth is presented. It would be reasonable to suggest that Kelly’s view of both football and the media is coloured by a healthy measure of cynicism. “Bolton, the great delegator, knew he had everything covered, specially his back,” he writes of the novel’s newspaper editor.

Kelly’s father was a mayor of Bootle. One of his sons, Matt, is the founder and editor-in-chief of The New World magazine. He has described the book as a lament for the lost soul of football. It is a novel about journalism as much as football, depicting some of the obstacles put in the way of truth-telling. The picture painted of how a club legend is treated and the response to events surrounding his death is bleak.

“With Dreadnought , I wanted to show how easily something beloved can be eroded when money takes precedence over everything else,” Kelly reflects. “I also wanted to show how journalism plays a critical role in exposing corruption, and create a story that shows the tensions at play in a newsroom when a big story breaks.”

I read Dreadnought amid the fallout from FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s attempt to sell off a slice of the World Cup. At a time when the avarice in football has never seemed more shameless, and the contempt towards those who might object so apparent, it certainly fitted the mood. Simon Hart