Description
SWEET FA collects 80 full colour football cartoons by Boz, initially published on a briefly successful and award-winning online version of a national newspaper from 1999 to 2001 to accompany the uniquely observant and analytical column of the same name. These covered a wide range of topics from League Of Ireland to the Africa Cup of Nations, with the Premiership (when it was still called that) and the Champions League looming large over everything.
Although a tiny sample of these cartoons have been presented the artist’s social media over the years, most have resided in box-files away from daylight for a quarter of a century!
Not just for discerning football trainspotters, fanatics, historians, and other ephemera gourmandizers.
“…it was bad enough that we had to endure the tired bookish smarm of the articles soiling the esteemed digital arm of our paper of record, but further illustrating the point with weak caricature, repetitive churlishness and depictions of feckless peasantry masquerading as wry humour was a slovenly editorial call at a time when Ireland should have been dictating international standards in sports journalism, not shitting on them from a great height”
– Breffni Donlevy-Bligh (Professor of Celtic Tiger Studies, UCD)
“I became a bit of an auld celebrity after being immortalised in SWEET FA… Everybody was buyin’ me pints down the local boozer… Even did a fundraiser streak around the block when Big Paddy smashed his teeth on the pavement stumblin’ home after the Champions League Final… I was their pundit, mascot… I was a fuk’n legend so I was… and then I lost me bleed’n job as school caretaker for some reason…”
– The Tolka Park Streaker
