Astroturf Blonde: Taking on the Men at Their Own Game Book

Alyson Rudd has achieved what most aspiring women footballers can only dream about. Not content with simple adoration of Liverpool Football Club (and in particular Steve Heighway) she has mastered the game herself with the Leyton Orient Ladies, played in men's football matches and to top it all, become a football journalist and columnist for The Times. Her novel Astroturf Blonde celebrates all aspects of football and contains a mixture of vignettes, memories and reflections of her involvement in "a men's world". The overriding theme is her weekly football matches in Regent's Park. These consist of almost religious preparation and organisation and amusing descriptions of the various "stragglers" that patrol the park in search of a game and the summer-long battles for pitch space with the corporate softball teams. Rudd writes with the knowledge that her enthusiasm for the game may be regarded by others as near fanaticism, but she simply revels in taking a pair of boots with her whether she travels and in her collection of replica kits, such as "the ultimate shirt … a lovely rosy-red long-sleeved Liverpool shirt modelled on the 1965 strip." She comments on the different characters that women's football attracts as she reflects on her experiences training and playing. Though the end of the book sees her begin to admit that she will have to live her playing career through her toddler instead, she will never lose the passion for "mimicking a soaring eagle" in her post-goal celebrations and feeling "an undiluted indefinable blast of happiness" to be involved in football. --Alison TaylorRead More