And Did Those Feet - Bolton Octagon - 03/10/07 by James Ellaby

Football is a very difficult to write fiction about in a convincing way. From those old comic books where the action on the field was always described by cliched chants from fans in the crowd to modern day attempts in film and TV, it always comes across as fake. Sadly, the sport itself has caught up with fiction in recent years, meaning that the most true-to-life depictions of it come in soap operas like Dream Team and Footballers' Wives, where the characters life in a world of privilege, sex, glamour and money, money, money.

And Did Those Feet is a kind of antidote to those, and a chance to see what football was like back in the days long before the Premier League and Sky Sports got their claws in it. The story is set around Bolton Wanderers' successful FA Cup run in 1922/23, culminating in the famous first-ever Wembley Cup Final, where so many fans got into the stadium that a white horse had to drive them back to the touchlines so that the match could be played. Needless to say, it was a world away from this year's Cup Final, the first at the new Wembley, though jokes about whether the old stadium would be ready in time certainly brought some context...

Instead of focusing on the players though, And Did Those Feet tells the story of a handful of Bolton fans living their lives and getting caught up in the magic of a Cup run. Bob is a jovial newsagent and die-hard fan, whose tradition of walking to away games even stretches to a hearty stroll down to Wembley. Jim and Ted are brothers who are struggling through tough times for Bolton's 'dark Satanic mills', while Jim tries to bring down Capitalism and Ted tries to follow the Trotters while also getting married to his very religious girlfriend Martha. On Cup Final day.

The most affecting of the stories though centres around the parents of a once-promising young Bolton player called Billy, who died in the War. The Cup run brings lots of memories back for them, and there are touching scenes where his spirit 'interacts' with his distraught dad Alf, while his mum Hilda quickly discovers the healing powers of football, joining the rest of the characters in Cup fever. The whole play is very evocative of its time, with the War still fresh in the memory for some while tough financial times in mill towns like Bolton start to take hold and the battle between religion and social politics is played out against that backdrop of workers and their bosses.

But all of that is forgotten when the match-days come around, and the play uses these very well, covering each of Bolton's games on the road to Wembley. Of course, it's not like they can show Match Of The Day highlights on the screen behind the stage, so they use a variety of methods to bring the action to live, through narration by each character in turn, and with part of the stage turned into a terrace for the fans to stand on and react to the events that we can't see. Mind you, as every game seemed to finish 1-0, with David Jack scoring the goal, it didn't seem like we missed much...

Music is used well in the play, particularly the two famous 'football hymns'. A quiet instrumental version of Abide With Me is played during a very sweet scene between Alf and his dead son Billy, while equally affecting is Jerusalem (from where the play's title comes) which is sung after the final as images from it are shown on the screen, including the faces of each of Bolton's heroes, all long gone now of course. Obviously, the play comes to a happy ending, that much you can guess from the fact that the Trotters did win the Cup that year, but there is a very Northern poignancy to the finale, and the mixture of that and the humour throughout (generally at the expense of Yorkshire and people from Yorkshire) make this a football story that is relevant, convincing and another triumph for Bolton.