Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
i was over the moon, 21 Jul 2004
normally i don't like books about sport, but this one is unusually intelligent, and having picked it up i was impelled to finish it. there's rather a lot about the author himself, but he's obviously had a lot of experience in the world of football and he makes some fascinating observations in chapters on cliches, terrace songs, commentators and even how football clubs were named. for example how afc bournemouth changed their name from bournmouth fc so they could be the first club in alphabetical order. it's really more a series of essays rather than a book per se, and occasionally they miss the mark, but this is more than made up for by the times when it makes you snort embarrassingly with laughter or gives you a nugget of information you want to tell your mates down the pub. not to be read on public transport.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
The boy done alright, 21 Nov 2008
"Football", the iconoclastic ex-Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once opined, "is a simple game". Yet, as Alex Leith shows the reader with Over The Moon, Brian it has a rich and varied language to describe itself. In a couple of breathless sentences of this quirky book's first page the author demonstrates this. He remarks:
The poor ball has to put up with a lot these days. It can be banana'd, bent, chipped, curled, hit, shot, smashed, tapped, thumped, thwacked, volleyed or weighted. You can have it driven, piled, crashed, looped, back-heeled, cork-screwed, touched, notched, sidefooted, trapped, wellied, hoofed, scrambled, held up, cleared, rammed or crossed.
The passage continues, in a similar fashion, for a whole, tongue-twisting paragraph. It shows that there is a certain peculiar kind of poetry in even the most prosaic of subject matters.
Leith is a sports and travel writer, by trade. Words are his currency. It shows in his intellectual curiosity about how language is used in football. In a couple of sentences regarding how footballer's nicknames are constructed he demonstrates this to the reader perfectly. He observes "Any sibilant (s, sh, z,ch) requires a `y' as in Rushy and Scholesy. Other consonants which also take a `y' include `d' (Gouldy), `p' (Sharpy) and `t' (Wrighty). In the consonants n, m and b take an `o' ending (Tommo, Robbo, Deano)". Clearly, Leith does not fear an appearance in satirical magazine Private Eye's Pseuds Corner: those words are rendered without humour or authorial tongue-in-cheek.
One of the major threads of the text is Leith's examination of the fashion in which footballer's abuse the rules of grammar ("When footballers talk footie they have a grammar of their own which does not obey all the common laws", he says). He does this by describing the rule and then providing examples of the way in which it is misapplied: for instance, the way they often use the past participle form of verb instead of the past simple in their descriptions (`the boy done his marker'). Leith is accurate in his statements. There is, however, a hint of sneering, mockery and snobbishness in that attitude. These supposedly slow-witted, inarticulate individuals have had to be highly-disciplined and hard-working - often neglecting academic studies that would enable them to be fluent, grammatically-accurate speakers of the Queen's English - to get where they want in life (For example, as Alex Ferguson once remarked of David Beckham: "He is Britain's finest striker of a football not because of a God-given talent but because he practises with a relentless application that the vast majority of less gifted players wouldn't contemplate".).
The text is full of esoteric information. For instance, Leith flags up the fact that military imagery in football reporting - `flank', `young gun', `marching orders', `shoot', `ricochet' and 'salvo' - is nothing new. He observes that "Early football reports back in the 1870s, often referred to the goal as the `enemy citadel' and the goalkeeper as a `sentinel'. It is also interesting to read Leith's words about what football writers want from the internet from a decade removed. On page 202 he makes a three-point plan. Firstly, they "want facts". Secondly, they "want statistics". Finally, he pleads for the internet to be "like a vast global football Rothmans where, at the jab of a key or two we can access whatever information we need about whatever team, game or player we need to write about". Sadly, he concludes "that's not there yet". In 2008, this global football Rothmans appears not to have come to fruition yet either.
Over The Moon, Brian is a well-written account of a subject scarcely discussed, and scantily looked at to such a length. Its occasional faults -its seriousness, obscurity and intellectual preciousness - may very well be regarded by others as virtues.
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