The Italian manager of the unnamed Premier League club in Alex Allison’s second novel is a chin-stroking savant nicknamed L’Oracolo who inspires both ire and devotion in the fans. Chants ring round the stands every weekend: “We’ve got the oracle / He sees what you don’t … ” But Greatest of All Time is, in fact, much more concerned with what passes by unnoticed and is forced to exist in the shadows.
As the novel opens, all seems fairly transparent. The anonymous first-person narrator – a player at the club – is asked to help persuade the exceptional French-Rwandan striker, teenager Samson Kabarebe, to sign for them. Our narrator’s willingness to take up the challenge is characteristic. He’s L’Oracolo’s protege, the team’s “teacher’s pet”: a dutiful, family-oriented, working-class 19-year-old who grew up close to the club’s grounds. He’s grateful for the life-changing possibilities top-tier football offers.
Samson, by contrast, is all strutting bravado. He courts the attention of new teammates and ecstatic fans alike, exuding “pure chutzpah” as paparazzi cameras flash. There’s more than a passing resemblance to Zava from Ted Lasso in some of Samson’s faux-gnomic assertions (“Monaco is an illusion”). Indeed, the abiding spirit of that show is evident throughout the novel, which is intent on turning the grand narrative of global sport into something smaller and more humane.
Initially, the narrator’s engagement with the feted incomer is rivalrous: Samson is given his position and squad number. But the anxiety of usurpation morphs into something else. The narrator’s intensely observed descriptions of Samson concentrate on his dynamic physicality. Samson is motion and action: he pounces on the ball, “snapping like elastic”; he dominates the pitch with “hurtling runs … springing leaps”. As in Allison’s debut, The Art of the Body, an unusual study of the realities of care work, disability and making art, the physical body is foregrounded. The narrator cannot evade thoughts of “the sinews of [Samson’s] forearms, the sharp edge of his jaw”; Samson is “all limb and length”.
Our narrator has “had these sorts of feelings before” and, in the past, a few secret kisses with Kyle, another player in the team. But Allison convincingly paints the hypermasculine milieu of the wider team as profoundly homophobic, resistant to the merest possibility of queer desire. “Locker room talk” is peppered with throwaway allusions to “poncey faggots”, slurs that the narrator works hard to appear unruffled by. And he is adept at that, after “years of hiding and ceaseless repression … auditing and controlling [his] emotions”.
Somewhat predictably, the lure of Samson’s physicality and easy charisma thwart the usual operations of the narrator’s emotional control: “Desire throbbed in my groin like a disease I might succumb to.” And succumb he does. As the team travel to away games and the two protagonists share rooms, Samson and the narrator begin a clandestine sexual relationship.
The juggernaut of transfer windows, possible relegation, dramatic injuries, gym sessions and post-match interviews chugs on as we might expect. Narrative drive is provided by the violent instabilities of Samson and the narrator’s relationship. A disquieting power imbalance and internalised homophobia underpin their encounters. Samson withdraws affection at will, decries their intimacy as “disgusting” and belittles the narrator’s careful tenderness. While the portrayal is keenly indicative of abuse, the narrator glows with a kind of pride that he alone “has the power to corrupt and pervert, tempt and turn” his lover. Notions of victimisation and predation are usefully equivocal.
There are, however, questionable elements throughout. Peripheral characters such as the team’s psychologist and Samson’s Mephistophelean agent are wooden and could have been put to much better service to draw out more of the central characters’ interiorities. The sex writing, particularly in earlier parts of the novel, certainly has the recognisable headiness of teenage angst but it often tips into absurdity, silliness or excess.
But it’s the flat ending that is most disappointing. In the final pages, the ratcheted-up tension ebbs away in an inexplicably rushed flurry, to be replaced by underexamined heterosexist convention. The narrator’s tryst with Samson, consequently, ends up feeling rather futile and insubstantial, leaving only confusion and dissatisfaction as the final whistle blows.
• Greatest of All Time by Alex Allison is published by Dialogue (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
