Over
the Moon, Brian: The Language of Football by Alex Leith (1998)
'IT'S A game of two halves - and a million words' - so says the cover of this book, which attemps to deal with all aspects of football's terminology.
The scope is staggering - Leith delves into the history behind clichés, chants, team names, player positions, tactics, tabloid-speak, commentator-speak, pub-speak and much more.
You may think all this is the statto's dream, and indeed it is in a way; it's the sort of book that the phrase 'more facts than you can shake a stick at' was invented for. Leith himself acknowledges this: 'even if you think what you've read is just a pile of facts thrown together I bet you didn't know some of them'. Did you know, for example, that Plymouth Argyle are named so because they formed out of a cricket and athletics club on Argyle Avenue? Or that there's a non-league team in Durham called Norfolk Enchance (work it out)? Next question is, do you want to know? This comes down to whether you like this sort of trivia or not, but a lot of it does raise a smile and it is hard to keep yourself from telling these nuggets of information to your mates down the pub.
Having said that, Leith does rise above this level as he discusses football and the media. He recognises football's cultural importance, that it has effected all media such as pop, television, literature and art. Especially interesting to me were the sections on fanzines and football literature; Leith interviews Andy Lyons, the editor of When Saturday Comes (see here for WSC book review), and Simon Kuper, editor of the excellent Perfect Pitch series. There's also an interview with the originator of one of the most famous football sayings ever, Kenneth Wolstenholme. If Geoff Hurst hadn't scored in the last minute of the game, Wolstenholme's commentary about his third goal may not have caught on: 'Yes! Yes! No! No! The linesman says no! The linesman says no! It's a goal! It's a goal!' Leith accurately points out that 'They wouldn't have named a TV series after that'.
This, then, sums up the tone of the book - the language is quite chatty at times, peppered with anecdotes, but this does make it very readable. It's not a stuffy, dry, sociological study - it makes cultural observation accessible while packing in a lot of information. One could argue whether sections on 'body language' and 'the language of numbers' are padding out the theory, but they do make the point that language is not all about words. This book will be useful to those studying football literature and the media, but it is also an enjoyable read.
Review by Sam Hawcroft