A VERY funny football book for all fans
Over 1, 000 slang words and phrases of hilarious football-speak
’It certainly hits the back of the net!’ The Football League Paper
A packed collection of dressing-room banter, tunnel talk, pundit-speak, gantry gaffes, classic clichés and terrace ridicule from the colourful language of British football. Short-listed, best-selling author Niall Edworthy brings sharp, high-quality wit to definitions for the rich jargon of the Beautiful Game. This dip-in anthology of terms is a celebration of the national game’s terrace culture, a laugh-out-loud entertainment and essential handbook for all football lovers in Britain and around the world.
Whether rolling off the terraces, yelled on the training ground, mangled in the post-match interview or muttered in the commentary box, the language of British football keeps on giving, a rich and peculiar dialect all of its own, peppered with spicy slang, clunking with commonplace classics and sneering with contempt and ridicule.
Badger’s Football Slang and Banter gives 110 per cent, leaves nothing on the pitch, stamping its authority with aplomb – and that little bit of quality – to create an absolute banger of a read for all football fans in Britain and the millions following Britain’s national game from abroad.
Sample Entries
Brown Trouser Time – Penalty Shootout
Cultured Left Foot – A foot that studied Moral Philosophy and Fine Art at Uni
Lung-Bursting Run – Any sprint up field longer than fifty yards, often fruitless, leading to the explosion of respiratory organs
Massive Club – The status of every club a new player has just joined, usually one that won the FA Cup in 1924 but nothing since
Orc – Northern fan, according to a southern one
Prawn Sandwich Brigade – A military-style unit of bourgeois fans who eschew traditional pies for seafood products in focaccia
Teacups – The go-to projectile of the angry manager at half-time
O autorze
Niall Edworthy is one of the UK’s most prolific authors and successful ghostwriters. A former reporter for broadsheet newspapers and the international wire agencies AFP and Reuters, one of his first beats was covering English football in the early 1990s. He also covered the 1998 World Cup and the European Championships in 1996 and 2000.Niall began writing books in 1997. His first book was England: The Official FA History, his third The Second Most Important Job in the Country, the story of England’s managers and the trials they endured. He is the author or ghost of almost 50 titles, most for the big publishing houses, many of them for well-known names (actors, soldiers, musicians, sportsmen & television personalities), others for 'ordinary’ people with extraordinary stories. He has written in a wide range of genres, mainly Biography, History and Natural History but also Humour, Sport and recently, in Fiction. His first novel, Otto Eckhart’s Ordeal, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Best Published Novel Award 2021.