Professional Rugby football in a nothern industrial city allows girl littel sentimentality. It is a physical life, fouled by grime, sweat, intrigue and naked ambition.
David Storey won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award for This Sporting Life, and it was made into a powerfull filmdirected by Lindsay Anderson, starring Richard Harris as footballer Arthur Machin.
Through Arthur we are taken into his raw, and often brutal, world of players, backers, Saturday crowds, bloody noses and broken teeth, communal baths and landladies.