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Don't Mention the Score
Seldom has the gap between national expectation and actual achievement been so wide as in the case of England's hapless football team..."Don't Mention the Score" is the tragic-comic story of how one small nation tried and failed to dominate world football. Littered with fouls, sendings-off, and more than a handful of off-the-ball incidents, "Don't Mention the Score" is a hilarious and often exasperating journey through England's 135-year history of footballing underachievement. It features a cast of cheating Argentinians, phenomenally boring but metronomically reliable Germans, and dreamily gifted Brazilians - all of them itching to hand out a technical masterclass in one-touch football to the recreation-ground clodhoppers of Olde Englande...In November 1872 England played Scotland in Glasgow in the world's first official international football match. The game ended in a 0-0 draw. Home internationals excepted, England remained haughtily aloof from international football for decades. When they finally deigned to compete in a World Cup they were stuffed one-nil by ...the USA.Four years later, in a match described by one England player as 'like playing people from Outer Space', they were beaten 6-3 by Hungary. In 1966 a Soviet linesman who'd had it in for the Hun ever since he copped a bullet at Stalingrad took pity on England and helped them win the World Cup. But since then it has been downhill all the way. In the rumbustious style of his bestselling "Stiff Upper Lips and Baggy Green Caps", Simon Briggs charts England football's rare highs and all-too-frequent lows. Embellished with some 75 black-and-white photographs, and incorporating more than 100 of the wittiest and most wounding quotations about footballers past and present, "Don't Mention the Score" is the perfect gift for any football fan, from eighteen to eighty.
- GenresFootball
351 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
August 2, 2011
Rarely have I found a book more pleasantly surprising. A screaming ‘Psycho’ Pearce sits beneath gaudy cover design and seems to be screaming cheap, trite and clichéd. How wrong I was.
This is an intelligent and engaging look at the history of England’s football team and Briggs manages to weave interesting vignettes out of what could have been a dull read. His balanced and amusing consideration of the history is witty, well-paced and well-written. He consciously gives more time to the pre-T.V.-saturation of the nineties and onwards and this makes for an intriguing retrospective of English delusions which extend back over more than a century.
Briggs is talented and has a great turn of phrase but he really should sack his publisher for the cover design. This book was a present and I’d never have picked it up otherwise. That would have been my loss.
This is an intelligent and engaging look at the history of England’s football team and Briggs manages to weave interesting vignettes out of what could have been a dull read. His balanced and amusing consideration of the history is witty, well-paced and well-written. He consciously gives more time to the pre-T.V.-saturation of the nineties and onwards and this makes for an intriguing retrospective of English delusions which extend back over more than a century.
Briggs is talented and has a great turn of phrase but he really should sack his publisher for the cover design. This book was a present and I’d never have picked it up otherwise. That would have been my loss.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review