Without generalising too much, is it fair to say that fans of football and fans of poetry don’t always go hand in hand?
Maybe that’s an issue of social class or education or a few other things. Maybe poetry doesn’t make itself accessible enough: it comes across as all intellectual and distant. “You’ve got to be intelligent to understand it.” No, we’ve got words, we share them. We all have words, we all have stories.
Memory is a theme that runs throughout the collection: looking back, nostalgia. To me there’s something sad there, as are the football grounds that live in the shadows of industrial glory and now often represent troubled communities. Was this intentional?
It’s interesting you should say that because I’ve got a friend who said that this book isn’t about football. He made that point, he said it’s about a world that’s lost. I’m not entirely sure about that, these worlds still live. Sad nostalgia? Yes, there’s a lot of that but I wouldn’t say that’s gloomy. I would say that’s quite cathartic, for me that can be quite enjoyable. At least there’s meaning. It’s not like living in a completely meaningless world. There’s something here that matters and still matters, the past matters and people get pleasure out of it.
The World Cup has just finished and there couldn’t be two more different iterations of the sport than the competition in Qatar and the football we have in Hinterlands. Is the book an attempt to recapture the rich heritage of the sport?
Most definitely. When I was a teenager I had a season ticket at Notts County. I could stand anywhere and it was just so accessible. I saw them in the old First Division, you could go on the night and get a ticket for teams like Everton or Liverpool. I occasionally went to see Forest play massive games too. But now, to get a ticket for a Premier League game you have to be a club member, go through the security checks, all to be penned into these plush stadiums. And it’s all so serious and everything, it bores the pants off me to be honest. I’m almost living what football in the 70s and 80s used to be in non-league, I’ve transposed it there and it’s alive and kicking. I went to a game recently, Runcorn Linnets against Belper Town in the FA Trophy. The ground was buzzing, loads packed in there. It was a superb game: some of these players have had trials for big clubs, they’re talented. Runcorn won but at the end, one of their strikers went around virtually every Belper Town supporter and shook their hands. The Belper Town fans were made up, you could see that. They literally got a connection with the sport—how could you get that from Premier League players?
