A Wag's Tale: The Beautiful Game (Claire Challis and Fabulous)****

Ex-Wag Fabulous joins with writer Claire Challis to tell you what being a Wag is really like. Fabulous of course is a pseudonym (and for all I know Claire Challis is too) but the book doesn’t tell you who Fabulous is and unfortunately I can’t guess. I don’t think it’s even made clear that Fabulous is female. It’s certainly an adjective more often applied to themselves by men …

The Beautiful Game is inspired by real life, but the characters in it are fictional. So I can only assume the resemblance between protagonist Louise and Coleen Rooney; chief Wag Tara and Victoria Beckham, and glamour girl Pattii and Abi Clancy are purely coincidental. I’ve spoken to Abi and I think she’s at least a million times nicer than Pattii but Pattii is kind of like how I expected Abi would be like. I have no idea who the fourth Wag, former actress Jodie is. Possibly she’s Cheryl Cole, but Jodie wasn’t a singer and Gary is far too nice to be Cheryl’s husband (I won’t dignify him with a name but he knows who he is).

The title is quite clever – as well as being literally both a tale about a Wag and a tale that was partly written by a Wag, a wagtail is also a type of bird – and so is a Wag. The ‘Beautiful Game’ part is good too – not only is this one of the clichéd terms for football, it’s also about Wags playing their own game: the game of being beautiful. It’s a very clever title (so it was probably Claire Challis, not Fabulous, who thought of it).

The Beautiful Game is full of action all the way through with a few dull clothes bits. You see the girls going shopping, getting discounts and free clothes (completely ridiculous, I’d never let a shop give me free clothes especially not if I was filthy rich). You see them having to dress their best every time they leave the house (fuck that, why should I bother, it’s not even as though they don’t want to see me looking a mess). Then they wear high heels for football matches and I’ve said in another post what I think of that. The other side of things involves them getting photographed wherever they go and suffering the indignity of their husbands and boyfriends going out and getting drunk and being caught with other women… okay maybe Jodie is Cheryl Cole.

But whilst there was never a dull moment, everything went by a bit too quickly. All too often, Louise found herself in a horrible situation, not knowing what she’s going to do – which is something we really like to see in chick lit heroines – only for us to find in the next chapter that three months had passed and all we know is that ‘everything sorted itself out eventually’. Maybe this is a realistic interpretation of Wag life, if not any life – a lot of the time, when something horrible has happened and your boyfriend is no longer speaking to you (I can’t say I’ve ever had this problem, with me it’s the problem was when they were all trying to talk to me at the same time) the truth is, nothing else does happen except that you keep on trying to talk to each other, a little bit more each time, and eventually things do change from stony silence to being back to normal.

That’s the realistic way of doing it but it doesn’t work so well in fiction. I like my drama drawn out as long as possible (and actually now I think about it that does also apply to real life). If Challis and Fabulous had tried drawing out some of the drama, they could have ended up with several novels, one for each plotline. The first book would have been about Louise first becoming a Wag. It does start off very nicely, with Louise feeling very lost and unsure and alone, and having lots of trouble because people don’t believe she’s Adam Jones’ Wag. But by the next chapter, she seems completely comfortable with it. Maybe Wagicity is something you do adapt to quickly, but there is so much potential in the idea of a new Wag struggling to fit in with her new lifestyle.

Later on, there are issues with Adam going out with the lads and getting drunk. That could take up a whole book. Jodie’s fiancé Gary (as we find out on Page 1 for some reason, even though this doesn’t happen until near the end of the book) is arrested on the News hours before their wedding. It probably should have taken a whole novel for Jodie to agree to take him back. I won’t spoil the book by mentioning all the little storylines, but Challis and Fabulous could have made a whole series, and I am quite disappointed they didn’t. The dialogue is convincing with just enough conventional Wag/footballer talk to make you laugh without stopping you from taking the situation seriously. The characters too are as Waggish as could be, but apart from Pattii they are all clearly very nice people. And although everything that was in the book was very exciting and enthralling. I just wanted more detail.

And another thing. This actually annoyed me quite a lot. At the beginning of the book, Adam and Louise move from Cardiff to Leeds. They met at school. Louise’s family lives in Cardiff. So as far as I can see, Adam and Louise are Welsh. I can see why Louise might have wanted to move to Cardiff to be with Adam, but not why her parents would go too. Also, Adam is even called Adam Jones, and you don’t get more Welsh than that (except maybe if he was called Rhys Jones). Not that there are any players called Jones who play for Wales at the moment but… never mind. My point is, it sounds like they’re Welsh. Doesn’t it?

But then I started wondering: how come Adam isn’t a Welsh international? He’s good enough to join a Premiership side, so he must have been considered. At the very least, he must have played for the Under-21s (Louise is twenty, so I’m assuming Adam is about the same - about half the current Wales squad are twenty or under). There are some really crap players who get to play for the Under-21s like Wrexham players, so Adam ought to have played for them too. Then Adam got picked for England and I was so annoyed. Maybe he was born in England and then he moved to Wales, and he made the decision himself that he would rather represent England, which isn’t unreasonable I suppose. But this isn’t made clear and I was really really disappointed. And he was much sexier when I imagined him having a Welsh accent.