Phwoar, phwoar, two ... Jilly Cooper swaps her Riders for strikers
She plans new soccer-based bonkbuster (called Tackle!)
HER tales of sexual intrigue among upper-class horsey circles have set readers’ pulses galloping and earned her a fortune.
But veteran novelist Jilly Cooper is switching her attentions from the polo field… to the football pitch.
Instead of her usual cast of cads and Sloane Rangers, she will be writing about millionaire strikers and their WAGs (wives and girlfriends).
In an interview with Kirsty Young on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today, she reveals: ‘Already I have got into my next book because I want to write about football. Don’t you think that’s a brilliant idea? It’s going to be called Tackle.’
Cooper’s fascination with ‘the beautiful game’ stems from an unlikely friendship with the multimillionaire chairman of Forest Green Rovers, the tiny National League side based near her Gloucestershire home.
She even went to Wembley in May to see ‘The Green Devils’ lose to Grimsby and miss out on promotion to the Football League.
Cooper, 79, who admits her previous interest in football was limited to a passion for former England striker Emile Heskey, has become a devotee of the team and chairman Dale Vince, a former New Age traveller who founded green power company Ecotricity.
In the programme, Cooper pays tribute to the fans by choosing their anthem Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley as one of her discs.
She tells Young: ‘We have a lovely little local team called Forest Green who are absolutely sweet and they are practically getting into the [Football] League. They took me to Wembley this year. We were beaten by Grimsby, which was really heartbreaking. But this is one of the songs the fans sing.
‘Elvis sings it wonderfully but to hear 3,000 men sing it… Wembley was terribly exciting I thought.’
Last night, Cooper told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I don’t think football could not be racy. You have got the managers who are enormously powerful and the WAGs. You get some terribly good-looking footballers, particularly now when they come back from their holidays so they are all bronze and hot to trot. I am very excited. It’s all there.’
Cooper also revealed that a chance meeting with former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson first inspired the book.
She said: ‘I went to dinner in memory of the heavenly racing commentator Peter O’Sullevan and I sat next to Alex Ferguson and he was wonderful, so nice and such fun. He spoke so inspiringly about the young and how one must gather the young into football. I thought he was so wonderful and I thought, gosh that’s a good idea.’
Cooper, who found fame with the so-called Rutshire Chronicles novels – Riders, Rivals and Polo – and who also wrote the bestselling The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, is famous for her bed-hopping male leads, most notably the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black.
It’s unlikely that Forest Green, which prides itself on being the first football club in the world to offer only vegan food to its fans, has anyone to rival him. However, chairman Vince hit the headlines earlier this year when a court awarded exwife Kathleen Wyatt £300,000 some 25 years after the couple divorced.
Desert Island Discs is on Radio 4 today at 11.15am and repeated on Friday at 9am.