How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The F.A. Cup

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup is the fourth novel by J.L. Carr, published in 1975. The novel is a comic fantasy that describes in the form of an official history how a village football club progressed through the FA Cup to beat Glasgow Rangers F.C. in the final at Wembley Stadium.

Like all of Carr's novels, it is grounded in his own experience. In 1930 as an unqualified 18-year old teacher he played a season for South Milford White Rose when they won a football knockout tournament. Described as the weakest of Carr's books it sold 2,124 copies and was remaindered.

The novel has been dramatised several times by different playwrights. In 1991, it was adapted as a play for eight actors and was performed at the Worcester Swan Theatre, the Leatherhead Thorndike Theatre and the Mermaid Theatre, London where it ran for six weeks. More recently it was dramatised by Brian Wright for performance by an amateur youth theatre, with a cast of sixty, in Northamptonshire.

The play was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2011 by one actor, Mark Jardine of Lichfield Garrick Theatre Repertory Company, who provided all the voices and characterisations. In this version the beaten finalists were Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C..

Carr bought back the rights to the novel in 1992 and reprinted it in an edition of 2,000 copies as the fourth novel published by his own imprint, The Quince Tree Press.