Pray Quotes

“And what are we saying, anyway? That only old money is allowed to buy success? Isn’t that a little like telling Noel and Liam Gallagher that they aren’t allowed to make anything of themselves because they didn’t go to Eton?”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“Manchester United would have retained the Premiership if they’d won this game – or, of course, if they’d won any of the other games they drew during the course of the season. Or, seeing as one extra point would have done the trick, if they’d drawn any of the games they lost, especially the two against Manchester City. Or, seeing as they lost the trophy on goal difference, if their victories had been achieved with a bigger winning margin.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“We are, a lot of the time, baffled by the news we see on the front pages of our newspapers, often because the stories are complex, and we missed the beginning of them anyway. (How far back do we have to go to find the roots of the Euro crisis? To 2008? 1999, when the currency came into being? 1992? 1945?) That is one of the reasons why natural disasters and murders and cases involving missing children become so involving: we understand them.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“Deaner ran down to the barrier separating the crowd from the pitch, and eventually persuaded the stewards that he had a part to play in the unfolding drama. (Anyone who has ever attempted to talk to a steward at a Premiership football ground will recognize that, whatever else during the afternoon required divine intervention, Deaner’s success in getting on to the White Hart Lane turf really was a miracle.)”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“During the season, fans tend to observe, in as many complicated ways and with as much detail as we can come up with, only that a winning team is very good, and a losing team is hopeless. My mother or Prince Charles or probably a Martian could make the same observation, but their views would be discounted on the grounds of ignorance.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“During the game, we find endless ways of saying that our team needs to score goals while at the same time not letting any in: ‘We need a goal here,’ ‘We don’t want to let one in now,’ and so on. (‘Here’ and ‘now’ are the words intended to indicate a keen understanding of the complex nature of the particular game, but in truth they mean nothing. Teams always need to score, and never want to let one in.)”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“For us it is not comparable, the FA Cup and Champions League,’ Arsène Wenger said before Arsenal played Leeds in the FA Cup. ‘The Champions League is compulsory. The FA Cup is something that is for enjoyment … The basis of our life at the top level is dictated by the championship. If we can add on top of that the FA Cup it is fantastic.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“Thirty years on, things have changes to the extent that Wayne Rooney could comfortably afford to employ the best-paid banker in Britain full-time, if he could see any purpose or momentary amusement in doing so.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“Manchester City striker Mario Balotelli sets his own house on fire, apparently after letting off fireworks in his bathroom. Two days later City beat United 6–1, and after scoring the first goal Balotelli revealed a T-shirt bearing the question ‘Why always me?’ This was presumably intended to be rhetorical, but Cheshire Fire and Rescue service, who were at Balotelli’s house until 2.45 a.m., could presumably have provided an answer.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“An official statement from Liverpool raised the spectre of a future where ‘a club’s rival can bring about a significant ban for a top player without anything beyond an accusation’. But on hearing this, many Manchester United fans would have been asking for a definition of the word ‘rival’.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“Is there a reason for the sudden fashion for the eight-goal tie? Maybe it’s because defending is hard, and boring, and thankless, and most people who are paid a six-figure sum weekly do very little that is hard or boring or thankless.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“When they – I cannot bring myself to use the first-person plural in this instance.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“In retrospect, their best chance of doing it this way was against Arsenal, in the game they won 8–2. They only needed another nine that afternoon – and they missed at least fifteen good chances.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“I watched a lot of drunk players, too, I learned from the autobiographies published after they had retired.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

“I have no idea what the record for being effectively dead is, but Fabrice Muamba didn’t seem to have broken it.”
― Nick Hornby, Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season