Friday Night Lights

I'm probably wrong, but I think fiction will never compete with fact when it comes to sport.

None of the supposedly great sporting dramas have ever done much for me - Raging Bull didn't feel remotely real, The Natural is just enjoyable fantasy and Field Of Dreams is just fantasy. I liked This Sporting Life, but that's more as a social commentary than a sporting one.

I'm thinking off the top of my head, so might have missed things that disprove my case. But, also off the top of my head, I can think of loads of truly great factual sporting films and books. Hoop Dreams, for example. Murder Ball. Searching For Booby Fischer. Zidane. And now Friday Night Lights.

Like the rest of my list, Friday Night Lights is more than just an account of some matches. It has a breadth and depth to rival a novel, as well as a real insight into a community and a way of life. But the sporting drama is also gripping. Even though the events described took place 20 years ago, they still feel like they matter in a way that something made up just wouldn't.

I can't really explain why that should be the case for sport and not other aspects of life - perhaps it's because sport is a sort of fiction anyway, a suspension of reality in which an audience pretends to identify with people they don't know and to desire an outcome that really shouldn't matter to them at all.

My fear is that the good factual writing on any subject actually beats most fiction (Homicide by David Simon is surely better than almost any crime novel) - but that can['.