Wordsmith Entry J

By Wordsmith Entry J
January 23 2007

 

 

 

 January has finally arrived and with it the New Year, a home tie against Biarritz and the conclusion of COYSDC’s inaugural Wordsmiths’ competition.

 

The competition has attracted an impressive response, with entries from board regulars, lurkers and other COYSDC denizens. Even a smattering of famous faces took time out from their day jobs to give us their thoughts on all things Northampton Saints.

 

The first selection of their travails can be found below – don’t forget to vote for your favourite!

 

Stuart Barnes, Sky Sports Rugby Pundit

 

 

Virginia Woolf, Author The Waves

 

Northampton, Northampton! How the insouciant Nene is gambolling through her, like a lonely woman, alone in this world and bootlessly conjuring up the turgid nostalgia of childhood.

 

There is Carlos. He is kicking the timid ball somewhere to the right of the quivering goalposts. There is Jon. He is cutting incisive lines, they are satiating my virtu. There is Paul. He is caressing the throat of the opposition lock with the tenderness of a falling feather, he is felling the opposing hooker with a zephyr of fists, he is a flâneur – watching with interest from the sin bin for ten minutes.

 

Look! She is employing delicate adjectives, she is writing in the present continuous, she is sad. Surely, she will now be remembered as the greatest female writer in the English langauge and not as the supposititious creation of a group of puling feminists desperate to attach literary credentials to the mediocre flibbertigibbet that she so obviously was.

 

Michel Houellebecq, Author Atomised

 

Michel decided he needed to stanch his anomie and interact with society. He decided he would follow a sport. Football was too conformist, too vulgar, too apocryphal. Besides, his hometown team were languishing in a division so low it reflected his state of mind a little too closely. However, his hometown had a rugby team. Rugby was far more authentic, far more daring. It reminded him of sex he had once had in Thailand.

 

By eschewing conventional wisdom, by shocking people by following this dangerous game, Michel could remain loyal to his values, and as the team was not having a particularly successful season, to his apathy.

 

Market surveys and sociological experiments showed him that most financially successful mid-level civil servants in the 18-45 bracket were likely to enjoy rugby. Comte was, he was sure, a rugby fan too.

 

Michel bought a season ticket, even attended the games, but every time when he drove home in his Mercedes, he would become aware of his superfluous existence and of the sempiternal nature of his ennui. Michel would efface the game from memory and whisper to himself, “I am so alone”.

 

Eddie Butler, Rugby Correspondent, The Guardian

 

Northampton is famous for its shoes and for its half-backs. However, Saints’ kenspeckle fly-half Carlos Spencer must be feeling pretty manqué. How the man they call King, a tregetour of the unco arts of the game, must be feeling saudade for the land of the long white cloud - as a barathum for the viands of quick ball and space, the abessive nature of both at his current manse, Franklin’s Gardens, must be anathema to him.

 

Despite the Gardens resembling a panopticon of late, Spencer’s confrere, the thelyphthonic Mark Robinson, has been eximious in the Sisyphean task of trying to conduct the farrago that is the Saints backs.

 

Those adhering to the mumpsimus and jobation that foreigners bring bupkis to the English game, may do well to look at Spencer’s famulus, the yare Stephen Myler. Under Spencer’s tutelage, the rugby league convert is learning fast and, before injury, was certainly easing the imbroglio behind the Saints’ scrum.

 

Although I haven’t actually said anything, or spatchcocked any of the Wordsmiths’ words into this short article, I have, as ever, taken the opportunity to disappear so far up my own backside that when I stand up my form resembles the shape of an apostrophe. And if that stops you asking yourself whether I’m Welsh or English, then that is all that matters.

 

Francis Fukuyama, Philosopher, Author The End of History

 

In 1989, I published a prescient article declaring the end of the Cold War had brought about the End of History. I argued that people would no longer wage war with each other. First, they would retire from the battlefield, second from politics, third from the sports field. Western liberalist economics would prevail. Argus-eyed observers will have noted Northampton Saints have proven me right - in their conflict between nostalgia for the Gordon Terrace and privileged entrance to Members’ Bars at £100 per annum, Western market liberalism triumphed.

 

As with all dialectics, this happened in three stages. First, they shut one of the ground’s bars. Second, they opened it to the three people prepared to pay a ton to sit it. Third, they reopened it to the general public, stocking it with three pasties and providing three glasses. Western values and economic principles were the victor.

 

Their second dialectic saw the quick end of on-field conflict. First, they lost in the play-offs every year. Second, they employed a South African who bifurcated the team. Third, they lost to Worcester Warriors at home every year, but that wasn’t important, as they did so in front of a full house. Western liberalist thinking prevailed.

 

Following these loses; the fans provided the third dialectic. First, they threatened perfidy – that they would tear up their season tickets, not drink in the Rodber, and start supporting Leicester. Second, they sobered up – they said that their support was unconditional, that the coaching team would come good in the end, and went on and on about Sam Harding not being in the team. Third, they began robustious support – they predicted bonus point wins over Biarritz, claimed Paul Grayson was the Second Coming, and pledged to buy AG at £14 a pint if it helped the team. Western liberal values prevailed.

 

Will Chignell, Sky Sports Commentator

 

Brilliant. Quite Brilliant. Quite, quite brilliant.

Brilliant. Oh that’s brilliant. Quite brilliant.

Franklin’s Gardens is quite brilliant. Brilliant.

And Carlos Spencer? Brilliant, quite, quite brilliant.

The word ‘piebald’? Brilliant.

Brilliant.

 

Bono, Musician, Philanthropist, Pope-elect

 

There is so much suffering at Northampton Saints and so little is being done to combat it. In fact, the Saints often increase this pain themselves, such as by subjecting their fans to home and away drubbings by Saracens and by still not knowing what to do with the nascent access road to their car parks. We must also ask ourselves this: Can a man drink a ‘fanbana’, can he feed his family with it?

 

I have sent a letter voicing my concern over the price of beer in Franklin’s Gardens bars, a direct cause of poverty for many fans, to U.S. President George W. Bush and arranged a meeting and photo shoot with Congress to discuss the failings of the academy system.

 

Single-handedly solving the world’s ills from behind the blacked-out windows of a stretch limousine is not an easy job, but I am a man with a cause, and helping Northampton Saints is an inherent part of it.

 

 

Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalyst

 

It ist ferry kleer zat zwei Things inhere in Northampton Zehnts. At ze Franklin’s Gardens zey are being obsessed with ze Scheisse and ze Money, both of which zey haff recently been in producing lots of in ze equal amounts, on und off ze Pitch respectively.

 

Dewi Morris, Sky Sports Rugby Pundit