When Chloe Kelly scored the winner for the Lionesses in last year’s Women’s European Championship final at Wembley, it triggered a volley of associations for those watching. Her slight pause before celebrating – in case the referee had found some infraction of the rules – was reminiscent of the 1966 World Cup final, when the players hesitated as the referee decided if Geoff Hurst’s second goal had crossed the line. The Lionesses’ victory was also a belated vindication, coming almost exactly 100 years after the FA had effectively banned organised women’s football. And Kelly’s eventual ecstatic gallop down the pitch – whirling her shirt over her head – echoed the same manoeuvre by the American Brandi Chastain in the 1999 World Cup final, the event that catapulted women’s football into the first division of global sports.
Kelly herself, when asked afterwards about her celebration, cited something with less obvious universal significance: the time QPR striker Bobby Zamora scored a last-minute winner in a 2014 promotion play-off match against Derby County that Kelly, a QPR fan, had attended as a child. And that, explains David Horspool, is how it works. Sporting moments “are attached, consciously or unconsciously, to a chain of historical connections – perhaps more truly a web – which spreads further as you look closer”.
Just how far does it spread? Well, how about to 60s Moscow, where exiled Cambridge spies Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess staged a Gentlemen v Players cricket match – reflecting the archaic divide between amateurs and professionals just as the cricket authorities at Lord’s finally dropped the distinction? Or to the fact that the UK flat-racing season has only two races named after jockeys – the same number as races named after royal mistresses (Nell Gwynn and Lillie Langtry)? Or to the terrace song Edward Elgar wrote for his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers?
These intersections between sport and politics, culture, economics, technology and so on are bewildering in scope, and reveal themselves in “national identity, class, gender, the relationship between country and town, the rise of commerce, the evolution of ethical debate, the development and effects of democratic politics,” writes Horspool. In interrogating all this he takes in horse racing’s relationship to bloodlines – “human and equine”; cricket and class; boxing and race; rugby union and Celtic identity; golf and land; tennis and women; cycling as an innately political act and the impact of the football fan. There are also a couple of off-piste excursions to look at the medieval tournament – jousting and the rest – as well as the Commonwealth Games, formerly the British Empire Games.
For those who know the histories of each sport there may be familiar material, but Horspool also explores the more complicated truths. Boxing, for instance, has always attracted a disproportionate number of young migrant men. Horspool traces that story back beyond colonial immigration to the Jewish East End, which spawned its own star fighters.
The fractiousness that surrounds cycling is far from a recent phenomenon, with the activity always having been prejudicially characterised as “dangerous, pretentious or faddy”. And the long-established myth that 1920s Britain was both scandalised and modernised by jazz age tennis superstar Suzanne Lenglen’s adoption of a headband and bare arms is tested against the realities of a time of dramatic progress in women’s suffrage, employment and much else. It would have taken a lot more to “rattle the teacups”, says Horspool, than “the sight of an accomplished young woman winning tennis matches with energy and precision, while dressed in a subtly different way to her opponent”.
Not that women’s tennis attire isn’t an instructive marker of wider preoccupations. The same is true of much of the sport in this thoughtful and entertaining book. Horspool writes that cricket has always been “a distorting mirror of British society”, and yet, if you step back and look carefully, what it reflects is clear enough.
• More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain by David Horspool is published by John Murray. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
