Tackle!: Let the sabotage and scandals begin in the new instant Sunday Times bestseller

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We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. It’s banal and cliched - while I know only a little about football I’m pretty certain the author knows less than me.

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. Seven long years after her last book – its subject was flat racing – this one, if the gossip is to be believed, was further held up by sensitivity readers and a publisher who wanted “more sex”.

I could almost imagine that possibly her ideas were in the book, but written by someone else to assist at some points. and usually what you get is a fantastic mix of outrageous characters you love and hate and rip roaring spicy plotlines riddled with silly puns, but this time it falls totally flat.

Tony Adams, Alex Ferguson and Kenny Dalglish are all here, and so is Howard Wilkinson, the chairman of the League Managers Association, who showed Cooper around the FA’s national football centre in Staffordshire, and introduced her to the England manager, Gareth Southgate. But ageing certainly does not seem to have dimmed his zest for life, love of beautiful women, that insane competitive streak. will get involved with a struggling football team and, despite the odds, will lead them to some kind of sporting triumph.Plenty of Cooper’s novels feature sexism which would outrage young readers today and make their older counterparts, like me, balk when considered through a 2023 prism. I loved being back in Rutshire, with so many familiar characters and lots of new ones who felt like family by the end of the book. She reminds us that beneath the surface people, famous or otherwise, are often hiding an emotional or physical pain that is not always visible or understood. With help from the club's ravishing and adorable secretary, Tember West, Rupert sets out to mastermind Searston's rise to the top, starting with taking charge of the players - much to the fury of Searston's manager. Riders at age 13 or thereabouts - I would not have been nearly so worried had she been reading Tackle!

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! Literary snobs have long dismissed Cooper’s novels as ‘chick lit’ and ‘bonkbusters’ written for silly, frilly, frivolous ladies. Recurring characters include Dora Beleveon and her boyfriend Paris and Etta and Valent Edwards who is his business parter at Searston Rovers, and of course there a whole list of adorable animals. Having said that, Tackle often felt like a patchwork quilt, sewing together many of the books Jilly's written over the years.As someone who grew up on Jilly Cooper books - Imogen, Octavia, Bella etc before the big sellers like Riders, I was so excited for this.

It’s true that Cooper has always championed women’s desire – no one has a better time in bed than her heroines.Her stories always have a high number of characters and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of who's who, even with the aid of her 'cast list' at the beginning. The rival football club and their corrupt dealings aren't going to make it easy for him either - and they have a history of foul play. This is a whole new ball game (pardon the pun) for Rupert and opens up so many cliche’s and opprtunities for Jilly Cooper to play with the and they make this book such a fun and fabulous read. I detect that she has strong views on the quality of the catering in football boardrooms, so perhaps they talked avidly of flaky pastry.