Back to School

The Portsmouth football team might (restrainedly) be referred to as multi-cultural, and with team-mates as diverse as John Utaka and Jermain Defoe it’s little wonder than sometimes the cohesion on the pitch suffers. However, rather than just fall in line with British convention and let them all bond over 8 Stellas and a strip-club, ‘Arry Redknapp has sent 16 members of his foreign legion for English lessons. Yes, that’s 16 out of the 28 first-team squad apparently need to learn what is conservatively referred to as ‘football talk.’

Polyglot Solutions, a laugh-a-minute language school based in Southsea, has been working with Pompey to ensure players can communicate with each other amid the pressure of a match, using that childhood stalwart of Subbuteo as a descriptor. The centre is run by cunning linguist Dr Jay Kettle-Williams, and his wealth of experience predicts just eleven hours as the average time it takes to educate from ‘zero English’ to competent enough to be able to function on the field. Subbuteo is used to re-enact a whole game, so the relevant phrases come to life; he could’ve used Pro Evo, but apparently second generation games consoles are yet to reach the south coast. Dr Kettle-Williams explains, in case you’re still struggling: “We work in the target language, and make sure what they're learning fits their specific purposes.”

He continued, somewhat smugly: “There's no point in teaching them to say ‘my uncle's pen is in your auntie's bureau,’ or how to buy a first class train ticket. We need it to be real, so they can function on the field. There's no time there for hesitation, or stopping to think ‘what do they mean?’ We teach them these phrases and then, in the next game, they are alert and switched on, understanding instructions from the sidelines and playing better.” As such, the familiar expressions they shall be concentrating on are favourites like: “don’t let him turn you,” “man on,” and “you are fucking blind you bald-headed cunt.”