My working life is split fairly evenly between two things that I love doing: writing and coaching football. They make a great combination, giving a balance to my working life. I’ve already written about my involvement with Man v Fat football, but most of my coaching time is spent going in to local primary schools to run lunchtime and after school clubs. Writing is, by its nature, solitary and sedentary. It’s something that I do on my own for long periods of time, whereas coaching is not only a more active pursuit it also brings me into contact with people. There’s a great balance between the two, but there are also some surprising parallels between them.

When I took my football coaching qualifications, the first step was the Football Association’s Level 1 course, which has now been replaced by the Introduction to Coaching Football, and after a couple of years running a team, I went on to do the Level 2 (which has now been replaced by the much more impressive-sounding UEFA C Licence.)

The difference between the two courses was huge. Level 1 was described to me by one of my Level 2 tutors as being designed to make sure that coaches were able to put on a session that was safe and enjoyable; at Level 2 there’s an expectation that the coach will be able to help players to improve, and to that end everything in your session has to be deliberate and intentional. I hope that readers of Foul and Fair will see something of the Level 2 mindset in the coaching sessions that Joao puts on for the Stoneleigh Swifts. The expectation is that coaches will have thought about what they are trying to achieve with the session, and how every aspect of the practice will work towards that end. Why is the pitch you are using that size, not bigger or smaller? How are you encouraging players to play in a particular way, to practice the particular skill you want to focus on? The course tutors didn’t necessarily have to agree with the decisions that we had made, but they wanted to see a thought-through foundation to what we were doing. Coaching is more than just laying out some cones and letting the kids play football, just like writing is a lot more than just banging out words at a laptop. Thinking about the two sides of my working life, there’s definitely some crossover between the mindset of a football coach and the task facing an author.

It comes back to that concept of intentionality, and to detail. Sometimes people try to read too much into a book, to look for details that weren’t ever intended to be significant – something my sons used to complain about when they had English lessons in school. Not every detail is thematically significant (sometimes the curtains are blue, not because they are telling us about the emotional state of the character, but because they happen to be blue) but if the author has chosen to give you a particular detail, it’s worth consider why. One of the things I most enjoy about writing novels is layering up the text, adding details that have an incremental effect, providing clues or prompts to readers about what to expect, or helping them to understand more of why things are unfolding as they are.

By way of example, in Foul and Fair there’s a moment where the main character, James, is reflecting on his situation and muses that he would accept a Faustian pact if it was offered to him, willingly giving up some things that are important to him in return for achieving a specific goal. He duly succeeds, and then in the next chapter encounters someone called Chris Marlowe. Readers with at least a passing familiarity with Elizabethan drama (which is as much as I’m willing to claim for myself) are likely to recognise Christopher Marlowe as the playwright responsible for Doctor Faustus, and foresee that his arrival spells trouble for James. Readers without that knowledge can still enjoy the story without missing out, but giving that name to that character was a deliberate choice and one with significance to the way the story unfolds. In novels, as in coaching, the details make a difference.