Footypedia By Daniel Maier

Published in Hardback by Century on May 01 2008, Priced £9.99

To celebrate winning the FA Cup by wearing its lid as a hat.

The smell inside a Ford Fiesta carrying five overweight England fans back to Lincolnshire.

The nagging feeling of resentment when you let a four-year-old score a goal past you in the garden.

The lovely velvety bag the cup draw balls are kept in.
Every football fan has seen or known these things. But who has the words to describe them?

How have we talked about football for this long without a word for surreptitiously timing a pre-match minute's silence, just to see if it's accurate? Or one for the feeling of frustration that the half of the league table you catch sight of on TV is never the half with your team in? Shouldn’t there be a verb that means: to reduce a 2-0 deficit to 2-1 in injury time, grab the ball out of the net and run back to the half-way line with it in order to get the game restarted as quickly as possible, despite the fact that your actions are completely futile since it’s the other team that’ll be kicking off again?

Yes. There should be. And there is. Footypedia: The Alternative Dictionary of Football is the hilarious, insightful and essential repository for all those things in football that up ‘til now have simply taken too many words to describe. The year's funniest, most off-beat and irreverent football book.

Baldock (n) – Inability to tell Thomas Gravesen and Lee Carsley apart.

Foyle (vb) – To ironically cheer opposition fans for their belated attempt to sing.

Quantrill (n) – Training exercise that appears to consist of players in woolly hats having a laugh.

Woffinden (n) – Utterly unintelligible post-match interview with a foreign player, left in the highlights programme solely to give the presenters and pundits something to laugh at.

About the Author:

Daniel Maier has written for television, radio and theatre. His credits include: Harry Hill’s TV Burp, Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression and Big World Cup, and The Peter Serafinowicz Show. He must have a sense of humour: he supports Newcastle United.