RWW

The Next Game is Always the Hardest

The Football Texts

Edited by Jürgen Roth
ca. 360pp, with an audio CD

Is the game of football the continuation of life or is life the continuation of the game? However one answers the question, this book provides the literary tools for everyone who discerns behind a football the mighty whirl of words of all comrades-in-arms, the verbal highs and lows on and off the pitch. Quotations, chance finds, reports, the conversations of experts, interviews and pieces of original soundtrack are to be found on these pages – condensed and concentrated, fragmented and re-assembled; in addition pictures, World Cup ballads and championship game verses, dubious decisions, news from players’ lives, radio collages and much more that may be summed up in the remark: fundamentally we’re always playing football, but with the wrong foot! (Ror Wolf)

The Next Game is Always the Hardest first appeared in 1982. The volume contains the preceding titles Punkt ist Punkt (1971) (That’s the End of It) as well as The Hot Air of the Game (1980); for the present edition it was expanded with the original recordings collage The Gradual Flagging of Powers (2006, with Jürgen Roth) as well as previously unpublished variants.

The editor
Jürgen Roth, born 1968, holds a doctorate in German, lectures on linguistics and is a free-lance writer; he has published several books and regularly contributes critiques of language to konkret, taz, Titanic and other periodicals. His main interests as an author are satire and football. Together with Ror Wolf he produced the original soundtrack collage The Gradual Flagging of Powers. He lives in Frankfurt am Main.