Q is for Quotations

James’ habit of working literary quotations into this team-talks in Foul and Fair started as a bit of fun for me while writing the book, and a way to make the footballing part of the narrative more enjoyable for any readers who aren’t necessarily that interested in match accounts. The running joke of him mixing up authors with namesake footballers provided me with plenty of diversion as I selected the matched pairs (I’d love to be a fly on the wall for a meeting between Jane Austen and Charlie Austin). Several readers have told me that it took them a while to realise that each referenced author had a real life footballing counterpart, but once they spotted the pattern, they enjoyed matching them up. Luke/George Bernard Shaw seems to be one who opened the door to a lot of people, although personally I’m particularly fond of my Michael/Wilfred Owen combination.

I never used literary quotes in team talks myself, although there was one notable exception, which inspired one of the incidents in the book. James’ impassioned reading of Do Not Go Gentle by Dylan Thomas (or is it Michael Thomas?) is based on something I said before a cup match against a very strong team from a higher division. We knew we were on a hiding to nothing, that the game was almost certainly lost before we even started. All I wanted from the match was for the boys to give it their best shot and to keep going, even if the game started to get away from us. I hadn’t made up my mind whether to play the Dylan Thomas card, which I thought might be too cheesy to work on a bunch of eleven-and-twelve-year-old lads. Instead I did a regular team talk, stressing how difficult the challenge was going to be. Looking around at the boys’ faces, I realised that I had maybe laid it on too thick and left the boys daunted at the prospect ahead of them rather than inspired to meet the challenge. So I wheeled out the poetry, partly by way of inspiration, but mostly to make them laugh and break the tension I had created. If they were laughing at their idiot poetry-spouting manager, at least they’d relax and be in a better place to play their football. It worked, we were brilliant. I say we were brilliant: we got hammered, losing by a wide margin. But the boys kept on going for the whole game, gave a decent account of themselves and even managed a couple of consolation goals, much as James’ Swifts did in the book. It was a game that we took a lot of positives from, in ways that the ‘it’s-all-about-winning’ brigade may never understand.