Club Renamed

[6TimesaRed]

Hull City Association Football Club have been renamed to Hull City Tigers..

This apparently has been done purley for Business Reasons.. Either way is a very Ice Hockey... American sounding name..

So let's say our owners went down that route with us...

Let suggest a name...

Liverpool Reds is the most obvious... I was thinking Liverpool Lizards 😀

 

[RedZeppelin III]

well obviously "liverpool Red Sox" . we probably shouldn't laugh at that one , you never know !!

 

[Whirly]

 

[gkmacca]

The Liverpool Family, obviously.

 

[gkmacca]

I can't wait for Steve Bruce's next novel, this one will no doubt be about a club getting an unexpected promotion and then changing its name. If you're not famliar with Steve's oeuvre, here's a taster:

Book Review: "Sweeper!" by Steve Bruce

​

Following a personal recommendation by The Old Batsman, I sought out a copy of Sweeper!, a slim, self-published thriller by the ex-Manchester United footballer and current manager of Sunderland, Steve Bruce.

Penned during the 1999/2000 season, while Steve Bruce was manager of Huddersfield Town FC, the protagonist ofSweeper! is one Steve Barnes, manager of the fictional Leddersfield Town FC.

From that information alone you will, I’m sure, already have an inkling about this novel. And you’d be right: it is one of the great postmodern, deconstructionist works in the British literary canon.

From the very first page, Bruce/Barnes questions the reader’s preconceptions about identity, as club owner “Sir Lawrence Brook” becomes “Sir Laurence Brook” within the space of two sentences. Snide thoughts that this might be a typo due to the lack of a proofreader/editor are quickly dismissed, as the sheer quantity of fundamental spelling inconsistencies can leave the reader in no doubt that they are perfectly deliberate. Not least, Leddersfield Town itself regularly transmogrifies into Leddersford Town. And back again.

Indeed, look carefully and you’ll see that Bruce’s challenging explorations of identity are prefigured by the specially-commissioned cover art, in which we see the real Bruce standing alongside his assistant John Deehan, onto whose image a (deliberately) crude moustache and hairstyle have been photoshopped. Thus, while Bruce/Barnes remains ‘real’, Deehan has been ‘fictionalised’ (in the book he is known as ‘Jock Durham’. Mostly.). But what is ‘real’? Again and again, Bruce/Barnes forces us to confront this question; and again and again, he denies us a clearcut answer.

Bruce’s control of plot and pacing is a masterful high wire act as he treads a delicate line between the direct and the elusive. Delivered in brutally minimalist, matter-of-fact prose (His office was comfortable. There was a computer on the desk.) which also serves as a witty pastiche of the Dan Brown school of writing, the story of a football manager caught up in the affairs of Israeli Nazi-hunters and fanatical kidnappers ought to be easy to follow, yet somehow Bruce contrives to baffle and confuse. By the plot’s ‘conclusion’ the reader will be none the wiser as to the motives of any of the main characters, nor indeed what any of them actually did, nor who they were, nor the significance of any of it to the subplot about Bruce trying a five-three-two sweeper formation for the match against ‘Burnwick’.

As one of the country’s most accomplished defenders in the early 1990s, Steve Bruce was expert at breaking up opposition attacks. He transfers these skills brilliantly to the page, wrongfooting the complacent reader at every turn. We are never allowed to settle as Bruce/Barnes frequently halts the narrative flow with lengthy asides about the technical specifications of his Jaguar motorcar, or some football grounds he has known, or his wife’s predilection for shopping. My favourite example, as we wait eagerly for Bruce to embark on a dangerous mission, is this pensée about breakfast:

I prepared and ate breakfast. My mother always impressed on me as a lad the importance of a good breakfast. I don’t go the full Monty: I can manage without a pork chop and black pudding. But I like cereals, followed by bacon and eggs. And toast with marmalade. All washed down with tea. That’s the kind of breakfast a man such as me needs.

Bathetic statements of the mundane, stark in their beauty, are sprinkled through the text like precious jewels woven into a tapestry: Then my mobile telephone rang. I did not curse the interruption. A mobile phone is a necessary instrument of modern business. And better still: It is a building more than one hundred years old. Built in the Italian style, someone told me. I wouldn’t have known. Architecture, like much else, is a closed book to me.

I cannot have been the only reader or reviewer to have found that phrase 'like much else'profoundly moving.

But these apparent non-sequiturs are of course the whole point: the ghastly, nauseous reality of the ‘ordinary’ – Bruce has been reading his existentialists! Sartre, Kafka, Joyce, Henry Miller: these are Bruce’s literary heroes and mentors. Yet by absorbing the approach of the modernist and postmodernist writers and taking it into new, common-man territory – that of Nationwide First Division football management circa 1999 – Bruce/Barnes democratises these challenging ideas like no other professional sportsman-turned-self-published novelist based in the north east of England of the last thirty years. The following extract, in which Bruce/Barnes faces the prospect of being shot, succinctly encapsulates the ethos:

The gun was level with my belly. So this was what it was like to die. There was no doubt I was going to die. And not even in Newcastle. Not even Premier League. In Halifax, of all places, with a club in the third division.

ThusSweeper!confronts the reader with as chilling a meditation on mortality as you’ll find. Think of England rating: Five thumbs up!

 

[Rosco]

I love the MLS team names, they're comically good.

Real Salt Lake is my fave.

I'd be up for renaming the premier league teams. Only if its not very PC

 

[gkmacca]

Real Salt Lake is my fave.

That sounds like a Paul McCartney & Wings album. I bet it has one of his 'experimental' paintings on the cover.



RED SALT LAKE (1979) Apple/EMI

Track Listing:

1. We Really Rockin'
2. Mr Magnolius
3. Ba-Ba-Na (Part One)
4. Marriage is a Beautiful Thing
5. Tin Lids
6. Shootin' Up
7. Jamaica Nights
8. Ba-Ba-Na (Part Two)

Bonus Tracks:
9. A Spot of Tea
10. Ay-E-Vulva!
11. When I'm Cleaning Windows
12. Ba-Ba-Na (Jam)

 

[6TimesaRed]

I love the MLS team names, they're comically good.

Real Salt Lake is my fave.

I'd be up for renaming the premier league teams. Only if its not very PC

I think with foreign ownership.. that is not that far off imho.. Only a matter of time before huge sponsorship deals are paid to allow this to happen..

 

[Rosco]

Sporting Kansas City is another great one.

I don't think we'll ever see the day PL clubs are renamed for sponsors.

 

[6TimesaRed]

Sporting Kansas City is another great one.

I don't think we'll ever see the day PL clubs are renamed for sponsors.

Hull City have just done it to attract sponsors and investement.. anything is possible... Money talks.. Tradition walks...

 

[gkmacca]

The Chelsea Franchises

Everton Welsh

Leeds Nutters

Queens Park Mercenaries

The Manchester Cunts

Bolton Pasty Barms

The Preston Pots

Wigan Wankers

 

[Ossi]

I can't wait for Steve Bruce's next novel, this one will no doubt be about a club getting an unexpected promotion and then changing its name. If you're not famliar with Steve's oeuvre, here's a taster:

Whaaaat? Is this for real?

 

[Rosco]

Hull City have just done it to attract sponsors and investement.. anything is possible... Money talks.. Tradition walks...

They haven't just changed their name for a sponsor.
They've added their nickname onto their name, to make the name a bit catchier for branding. Which as soulless as it is, isn't a bad idea when you're called Hull City AFC - to be honest I didn't know what came after Hull and most if the world probably didnt. I know what they're called now though.

But feel free to bump this thread in 15 years time when we're renamed Coca Cola FC to prove me wrong.

 

[gkmacca]

Whaaaat? Is this for real?

Oh yes, he's written about three of them! This is probably my favourite passage:

The gun was level with my belly. So this was what it was like to die. There was no doubt I was going to die. And not even in Newcastle. Not even Premier League. In Halifax, of all places, with a club in the third division.

 

[gkmacca]

Come on, Hay Hef Cee!
Sort yerself hout, 'Oward! Hit's now 'Ull City Tigers!
Play oop, the Tigers!
That's better. Now yer talkin'...By the way, I like yer cap. Where'd you get it?
None of yer bloody business!

 

[Frogfish]

I can't wait for Steve Bruce's next novel, this one will no doubt be about a club getting an unexpected promotion and then changing its name. If you're not famliar with Steve's oeuvre, here's a taster:

HAHAHHAHAHAHA that 'review' is sheer brilliance !

 

[Frogfish]

The Manchester Cunts

This one has a particularly apt ring to it. Just rolls off the tongue.

 

[6TimesaRed]

They haven't just changed their name for a sponsor.
They've added their nickname onto their name, to make the name a bit catchier for branding. Which as soulless as it is, isn't a bad idea when you're called Hull City AFC - to be honest I didn't know what came after Hull and most if the world probably didnt. I know what they're called now though.

But feel free to bump this thread in 15 years time when we're renamed Coca Cola FC to prove me wrong.

They did have a shite name to begin with to be fair.. Like you say I think it probably suits them better...

I don't think you will see direct branding like that as such.. but for the right money sponsors will try and have a say...

 

[gkmacca]

The Ipswich Oooh-Aaars.

 

[6TimesaRed]

Wigan Wankers

I just spat my cereal out.. very good...

 

[Leo]

The Fulham Jacksons.
Arsenal Frugality.