The Sugar Mouse Ritual

Remember that a couple of weeks ago we talked about superstitions in sport? The following text is an adapted extract from Nick Hornby's novel, Fever Pitch. The novel is autobiographical, and it revolves around the author's (and his friends') relationship with football, and especially with Arsenal, his favourite team. Each 'chapter' focuses on a different football match. Here's the one that I have chosen:

SUGAR MICE AND BUZZCOCKS ALBUMS

CAMBRIDGE UNITED v ORIENT

4.11.78

What happened was, Chris Roberts bought a sugar mouse from Jack Reynolds, bit its head off, dropped it in the Newmarket Road before he could get started on the body, and it got run over by a car. And that afternoon Cambridge United, who had hitherto been finding life difficult in the Second Division (two wins all season, one home, one away), beat Orient 3-1, and a ritual was born. Before each home game we all of us trooped into the sweet shop, purchased our mice, walked outside, bit the head off as though we were removing the pin from a grenade, and tossed the torsos under the wheels of oncoming cars; Jack Reynolds would stand in the doorway watching us, shaking his head sorrowfully. United, thus protected, remained unbeaten at the Abbey for months.
I know that I am particularly stupid about rituals, and have been ever since I started going to football matches, and I know also that I am not alone. I can remember when I was young having to take with me to Highbury a piece of putty, or blu-tack, or some stupid thing, which I pulled on nervously all afternoon (I was a smoker even before I was old enough to smoke); I can also remember having to buy a programme from the same programme seller, and having to enter the stadium through the same turnstile.

There have been hundreds of similar bits of nonsense, all designed to guarantee victories for one or other of my two teams. During Arsenal’s protracted and nerve-racking semi-final campaign against Liverpool in 1980, I turned the radio off half-way through the second half of the last game; Arsenal were winning 1-0, and as Liverpool had equalised in the last seconds of the previous game, I couldn’t bear to hear it through to the end. I played a Buzzcocks album instead (the Singles – Going Steady compilation album), knowing that side one would take me through to the final whistle. We won the match, and I insisted that my flatmate, who worked in a record store, should play the album at twenty past four on Cup Final afternoon, although it did no good. (I have my suspicions that he might have forgotten.)

I have tried “smoking” goals in (Arsenal once scored as three of us were lighting cigarettes), and eating cheese-and-onion crisps at a certain point in the first half; I have tried not setting the video for live games (the team seems to have suffered badly in the past when I have taped the matches in order to study the performance when I get home); I have tried lucky socks, and lucky shirts, and lucky hats, and lucky friends, and have attempted to exclude others who I feel bring with them nothing but trouble for the team.

Nothing (apart from the sugar mice) has ever been any good. But what else can we do when we’re so weak! We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; is it any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?

 

1) Name at least 5 rituals mentioned in the text. Which has been the most successful?

 

2) How did the 'sugar mouse ritual' originate?

3) How did the 'Buzzcocks' ritual start? Why does the writer think didn't it work in the Finals?

4) What does the writer mean when he talks about 'smoking goals in'? What about 'lucky friends'?

5) Analyse the idea of 'power' in the last paragraph.

6) Find an expression in the text that means...

a. until now or until a particular time (paragraph 1)

b. sadly (paragraph 1)

c. an idea, something said or written, or behaviour that is silly or stupid (paragraph 3)

d. something that is difficult to do and causes a lot of worry for the person involved in it (paragraph 3)

e. a rite, a particular set of words, music and actions used in ceremonies in some religions (paragraph 5)

Please hand in your assignment by e-mail (mmasuyama.nes@gmail.com)