Karen Viggers’ fifth novel centres on a junior soccer team, but the ambitions and rivalries of the parents are the real story.  

Although I’m not a footy fan, I bought Sidelines at last year’s Port Fairy Writer’s Festival after hearing Karen Viggers speak passionately about the way she incorporates the Australian landscape into her stories.

However, Sidelines sat on my bedside table for months. I did not feel like reading it, put off by the lacklustre cover with its stock photo of a mother and daughter looking over a soccer field. Then I read Helen Garner’s The Season, her ‘nanna’s book about footy’. Although it has attracted rave reviews, I was disappointed. I love Garner’s work but this one did not win me over. Too much footy for me.

Despite these obstacles, eventually I opened Sidelines, and it was a huge surprise. I simply could not put it down, and raced to the end before rereading it more slowly. It is a riveting and important read.

This is not a book about footy. Its main themes are bullying and unrealistic parental expectations and the stress this causes children.  

At the centre of the novel are two families: the wealthy, well-dressed and university-educated Ben and Jonica and their twins, Alex and Audrey; and the close, working-class Greek-Australian family of Carmen and Ilya and their youngest child, Katerina. There is also a single dad, Lang, and his son Griffith, who come into the story about a third of the way through. Lang drives a rusty yellow car, has tattoos on his arms and scars on his face, drinks heavily, but loves footy and his son, who is a naturally gifted player.

The novel opens with a prologue describing an ambulance rushing to a football field, siren wailing, lights flashing, after a violent brawl breaks out. As the paramedics attend to the injured child lying nowhere near the goalposts, they wonder, ‘What the hell happened here?’

The author then takes us back nine months to the events that led up to the brawl. The novel’s plot skilfully weaves through five different first-person viewpoints: Jonica, Carmen, Audrey, Katerina and Ben, with twice as many pages devoted to Audrey than the others. Clearly, her story is central.

Tensions, resentments and rivalries run like rivulets through the book. These surface between Jonica and Carmen, Audrey and Katerina, Ben and his younger brother, Darren, as well as between siblings, classmates, and those in the soccer team.    

But the spotlight is mostly on Audrey and her family. Her parents have been arguing a lot. Before the children arrived, Jonica had been a senior solicitor and now wants to go back to work, to be someone ‘other than a mother’, the one who manages all the domestic tasks. She’s keen to use her brain again, and wants intellectual stimulation. Ben is a barrister and wants her to stay at home. Audrey overhears them one night:

We don’t need you to work. We’ve got plenty of money.

It’s not about money. It’s about intellectual stimulus. I want to feel like I’m doing something useful, making a contribution.

Bringing up kids is a contribution.

Yes, of course. But I’ve done that for nearly fourteen years.

Audrey hears the bitterness in her mother’s tone and her heart beats wildly; she fears they are going to break up.

Ben comes across as a bit of a bully, and seems to make most of the decisions. He wants the twins to have the best. He was the one who insisted they play soccer and constantly pushes them to improve, especially Audrey. Jonica goes along with it reluctantly, but queries why they have ‘to be good at it’. Ben explains that it is social currency. ‘Being good at sports buys friends and popularity.’

Ben’s brother, Darren, is also serious about footy, although Claire, his wife, is not so keen. Their son Tommy plays in a rival team to Alex and Audrey. At a traditional Christmas dinner with the two families, the chat swings to football.

They need to make football more fun, Claire says …

It’s not meant to be fun, Darren says. It’s toughen up or get out. These kids can handle it.

Rubbish, says Claire. It puts kids off sport. Coaches should try to nurture instead of using punishment. It’s basic child psychology.

Jonica agrees with Claire. For all the positives that team sport is supposed to bring – camaraderie, belonging, self-esteem, confidence, making friends – she feels hard-pressed to see any of this, especially for Audrey.

As well as the tension at home and pressure from her father, Audrey is being bullied and teased by Katerina, who on separate occasions steals Audrey’s shin guards, boots and water bottle. At first, Audrey is blamed by her father and Dominik, the coach, for ‘losing’ these things. She feels crushed:

I HATE Dad. He’s so mean. It’s like he doesn’t know me at all. I mean, as if I would lose my shin guards on purpose! He must know it was an accident. But he doesn’t care how upset I am or that he’s hurt my feelings. I was already feeling shit … and then he had to go on and on at me like I’m a five-year-old. I wish he’d just shut up. Doesn’t he know he’s making me hate football?

Katerina also has a history of pushing and shoving Audrey, condoned by her mother.

Katerina rushes in and gives her a sly kick in the shins. Audrey misses the ball, and then Katerina has possession, all without Dominik noticing. Good on you, girl, Carmen thinks. Whatever it takes.

This bullying and parental pressure have serious consequences for Audrey.  

The real heroes of this tension-filled narrative are Griffith and his dad. They may be from the wrong side of the tracks, but what a breath of fresh air they are compared to the other parents and kids behaving badly. And Viggers even manages to incorporate snippets of the Australian landscape into the story – gum trees, possums, even a little sugar glider with its ‘gliding membranes undulating in the pale light’.   

The title Sidelines is clever and apt. As well as meaning the boundary line that marks the edges of the playing field, sideline also means to be removed from the centre of activity or attention. Not only was Ben’s wife sidelined, but so were Audrey and Katerina. They were not given the attention and understanding they needed.

Sidelines is a simply wonderful book. It would make an excellent miniseries and I’m surprised nobody has picked it up. The story is of particular relevance at this time with the success of the miniseries Adolescence, which also raises tough questions for parents.

Karen Viggers Sidelines Allen & Unwin 2024 PB 368pp $32.99

Mary Garden is an award-winning author and a journalist, with a PhD in Journalism (USC). Born in New Zealand, she settled in Queensland in the late 1970s. Her new book My Father’s Suitcase: a memoir was released in 2024 and was the joint winner of the Goody Business Award 2024 in the self-help/memoir category.

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