Her women might be unwashed and on a deadline, worrying about competing in professional sport while menstruating, farting with rage, peeing in sinks, navigating the agony of unrequited love, failing to get pregnant and, even, attempting suicide. Sitting down to read 'Tackle' was like relaxing into a favourite armchair it was so comfy and familiar.

Jilly has taken to football as naturally as to horses, TV or opera and the pace was as ever, rollicking and jam packed with ascerbic one-liners and inventive puns. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.No one could just be ‘ Patrick’ or ‘Lisa’ instead they all had to have stupid nicknames , really really stupid nicknames . isn’t, by a long shot, Cooper’s best book; the ball, you might say, doesn’t quite find the back of the net. With Cooper’s signature blend of formidable characters and scandalous behaviour, it is the latest in her phenomenally bestselling Rutshire Chronicles series.

And yet Cooper, who is 86, has sold 11 million books in the UK alone (perhaps her most notable fan is Rishi Sunak). The reader is plunged straight into the feisty frolics, back stabbings and genital shenanigans of all the favourite star characters plus some delicious cameos from Jilly’s earlier books. I have consistently wanted to live in the world that she has created since I first read Riders many years ago I eagerly awaited her foray into Football. Paper-thin characterization, contrived and silly plot lines, it races from one implausible event to the next breathlessly, and utterly lacking any depth or dimension.

One imagines that the sensitivity readers, if indeed they existed, were in the end just as frustrated by Cooper as her supposedly sex-fixated editors – though if this was the case, I can’t sympathise at all.

Rugby seems a little more Rutshire’s style than football, but I actually love football more, and I have also enjoyed Cooper’s previous novels, so that was an absolutely perfect fit for me!

To use words Cooper would doubtless scorn at as PC abominations (she has said she misses wolf whistling and that modern men are “always crying” and “growing beards”), many of her heroes and plots are 'problematic' and possibly 'triggering' for today’s audiences. Always love a Jilly but am not a fan of football, and think rugby would have been far better suited to the upper class RCB. Still injured from the fight with evil Jan Devanter at the end of Mount he should be taking it easy. Jilly Cooper’s books are normally a great romp, with characters who are human, flawed, yet very engaging.

Rupert is now sixty years old, and in his personal life anyway he has seemed to have calmed down, especially after Taggie’s diagnosis. There was a lot of football terminology, but it was written in such a way that it didn’t bog me down, and as I previously mentioned a football club opens up all kinds of wonderful plot lines. There was a lot of fun and inuendo around the WAGs, a few cliche’s that made me smile like the power srtuggle among them and the affectations of trying to be posh. What on earth is Rupert Campbell-Black, ex-world showjumping champion, hugely successful owner, trainer and breeder, and a former Conservative minister for sport, doing in a novel about football? Cooper – sorry, I mean Campbell-Black – has loads of ideas for improving Searston, for its fans as well as its players.

Normally there are many characheter backgrounds and situtions happening and they become interwoven throughout the book and with other characters. Her novels, including Riders, Rivals, and Polo, were the backdrop of my formative years: I wanted to fold myself into the pages and inhabit this fictional landscape where women were “ravishing”, everyone was accomplished, every orgasm ecstatic, bad people got their just deserts and love always won. And the difficulty in picking a football team for a subject is that there are a lot of players transferring in and out so you don’t get to truly know them in the way you do with the spectacular heroes and villains of the past (e. There is plenty of drama, with business and personal rivalries, betrayals, affairs, broken hearts both romantic and profesional but there is also lots of fun, my favourite bring actor Paris Alverston teaching the football team how to dive and limp convincingly; if you watch football this will resonate with you. As Searston’s new owner, he won’t stand for anything less than victory in the Premier League, despite the odds being stacked against him.