What can we say about Oxford United? Part I: Football writing and language

What can we say about Oxford United? One response might be: a lot, apparently. Thousands of words are poured out every week by commentators on the activities of this football club in print and on the web. Within minutes of a ‘story’ being reported, you can usually go to three or four other websites that will report the self-same facts, often using pretty much the same words. But when we’re told, on the signing of two new players, that one describes himself as ‘…very energetic, I get up and down the park and I've got a never-say-die attitude.’, and the other contrasts himself as having ‘Lots of energy and a never-say-die attitude.’, what have we learnt here?

To some extent this is a problem with the language of football and football writing. Every skilled left-footed player is ‘cultured’, every struggling manager is in danger of ‘losing the dressing room’, and every striker who shows a propensity for scoring from within the six yard box is ‘a poacher’. Duncan Hamilton eloquently complains about the limited language deployed in the description of football in the first chapter in his book on Brian Clough (even if he then doesn’t live up to this weighty gauntlet he throws down for himself). But for the supporter, in the internet age, looking for this kind of news on Oxford United becomes like a dirty habit – the fix we secure is all too often too weak, and we’re driven back to scrabbling round for more. And that’s before we even start considering message boards.

It’s in this context that we’d like to spend a couple of posts considering what it is possible to say about Oxford United, and what we can say. Forgive the self indulgence. The close season provides a time to step back, and try and take an overview of what has passed before, and what we hope to achieve in the next season. We’ve found ourselves doing just that. We wrote before that this blog had originally intended as a one-season experiment, and had ended up doing things that hadn’t been originally envisaged. One of those things was to try to write in a more creative way, when we’re more used to a ‘critical’ tone. So this will be a brief return to some critical writing.

At the end of the season, we look around and find ourselves as one of a number of blogs on the subject of Oxford United. If we’re seeing the start of a growth of blogs about Oxford United, we think that these thousand electronic flowers should be encouraged to bloom. Blogs are by their nature of the moment, but momentary too. More importantly, we think they allow the potential to say something different, and differently, about Oxford United. The demise of an Oxford United fanzine has left a hole that blogs could fill, but in turn these blogs could open up new possibilities. That's what we'd like to consider over the next couple of weeks.