THE GROUNDSMAN QUARTERLY is an independent journal of football, literature and sporting life, published with varying degrees of punctuality from our gloomy editorial rooms in Cheshire, sometimes from the sun-bathed decks of the editor-in-chief’s Yacht during the summer team building gladitorial games.
Founded sometime during the year of 1888, the journal began life as a modest almanac concerned principally with pitch conditions, drainage, goal-net maintenance and the correct winter treatment of heavy clay. It remained, by all surviving accounts, almost completely unread.
At some point during the early twentieth century, a French editor named Marcel Michel in the pages of a 1921 spring edition asked the question: « Bloody, Pourquoi ? » and soon after began allowing match reports, small town romantic correspondence, poetry and short essays to appear, cosily niched away between the agricultural notices. Naturally, by 1927, football, the arts and proto-hooliganism had effectively taken over the publication, much to the dismay of the Cheshire Groundsmen Union, who went on to found the aptly named : The Grass is Greener, whose publication ran from 1927 to 1928 to limited success.
While the publication remains a humble one, we are indeed proud to have sent three unpaid interns to continue to be unpaid interns at The New Yorker as well as The Paris Review, they remain there, between the Brothers Karamazov and the espresso machine, forever in our hearts.
The present Editor-in-Chief is Archie McBurnie, unaminously elected by the board by way of back alley punch-ups behind the pub. His principal responsibilities include commissioning articles, shortening them, extending them, losing them, finding them again and informing contributors that their invoices are “with Accounts.”
Legal complaints should be addressed to the Editor and marked PRIVATE & URGENT, whereupon they will be placed immediately beneath several older complaints.
Mr. Archie McBurnie
THE GROUNDSMAN QUARTERLY
The beautiful game, considered for the cultivated geezer.
