Encyclopedia Blazertannica is a massive reference guide to everything authors Roger Bennett and Michael Davies have discussed on their Men In Blazers podcast. Longtime readers may recall that this is one of my favorite podcasts and that I attended a live recording of one of their shows on the day of the England-Croatia World Cup semifinal – it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed this book a great deal.
The book is, like the podcast, mostly full of insights and commentary into the world of football and the unique way an American must interact with it. No thought summarizes the challenge better than the observation that someone drinking at 7:30 in the morning is an alcoholic… unless that person is watching a soccer game. Surely, in the areas of the world where games are played and televised at reasonable local hours, the joys of a breakfast Guinness remain unknown and, most likely, vilified.
I also want to highlight how much I agreed with the notion that willful delusion is a part of fandom. The authors highlight how this is best illustrated in England through reaction of fans to diving (pretending to have been fouled in an attempt to deceive the referee). In general, fans always berate divers and demand that the deceit must be immediately removed from the game… assuming the diver is foreign, of course. If the diver is English, then the response is always along the lines of – well, he must have felt something, because he’s English and would never do that!
There is more to the book, however, than football and alcohol. I liked the life advice that although knowing your strengths is vital, it is more important to know your weaknesses and determine which ones you cannot improve on. As highly popular guest Barry Hearn once said during an appearance on the show, life is about making the most out of the same twenty-four hours we all get and wasting any of those hours on what is destined to remain fixed is no way to meet that challenge. A good way to apply this understanding is to how we treat an acquaintance – unlike a friend (for whom we should do anything) an acquaintance is someone to make the most of.
Of course, no mention of Men In Blazers – and Roger Bennett in particular – is complete without some reference to poetry (and often to verse about the first World War) (1). As they point out, the poet must be truthful for all a poet can do is warn. It is vital to heed these warnings because a warning ignored isn’t much different from a warning never issued at all – and in life, it is usually what does not get said that causes the most damage.
Footnotes / pretty much everything else they regularly quote is nonsense
1. Ladies and gentlemen, Phillip Larkin…
The most frequently quoted poetry are the following lines from Phillip Larkin’s 'The Mower':
We should be careful
Of each other
We should be kind
While there is still time
