Loose Head by Joe Marler

When the ball's up in the air and it's
a perfect kick, it doesn't matter
how great it looks, cos there's
no telling which way it's going
to bounce when it hits the floor.

This is not me giving up on Joe Marler. It’s not.

 
IT IS NOT.

 
Ok, it is. But in my mind, I have an out, a free pass, a justifiable excuse.

 
It’s a fucking audiobook.

 
Audiobooks, for me and for the most part, are background noise. The act of ‘reading’ an audiobook is passive, it’s absorption rather than consumption. Auditory osmosis. To date, I have ‘read’ three audiobooks which weren’t collections of episodes of BBC Radio 4 comedy programmes, or free CDs from the front of a tabloid newspaper of classic books to which I listened once upon a time to help me fall asleep, to wit:

1. Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
2. Elis and John Present the HolyVible: The Book the Bible Could Have Been by Elis James and John Robins
3. Loose Head: Confessions of an (Un)professional Rugby Player by Joe Marler (the prologue and first two chapters anyway)

In that order. In each of the first two instances, I had a dog in the fight: I was and am fascinated by Obama and his political legacy, the unprecedented 563 drone strikes which killed up to 807 civilians unrelated to military targets* notwithstanding; and I love the comedy vehicle that is the Elis and John BBC Radio 5 Live podcast-first format show, which I stream through a commercial streaming site rather than through BBC Sounds because I can play music seamlessly between episodes and catch up on the latest breathtakingly and hilariously crass expositions of Frankie Boyle, Susan McCabe (get well soon Susie) and Christopher MacArthur-Boyd, and the lukewarm provincial dad-chat of the Beans, neither of which would be welcomed by the balance-obsessed editors of audio output at Media Citeh.

I started listening to Joe on the back of the very last recommendation by Steff Garrero of the SDSBP I will ever consider.

 
He has let me down for the final time.

 
To give Joe his due, he has struggled with his mental health over the years and this book is a very brave thing to attempt, especially as he’s reading the whole thing himself and given he’s a rugby player it might have been the very first time he’d read any of it.

 
That is a low blow, sorry; I will try to be more balanced, pros and cons here we go.
Pros:

1. He’s actually a likeable bloke, really down to earth and funny.
2. In retrospect I’ve heard him speak on sports radio and he was genuinely worth listening to.
3. He was a fat kid (his words) and rugby was the only thing he felt he was good at – that’s quite endearing.

Cons:

1. He doesn’t have a Bristolian accent – I have no idea why I thought he would have, given he was born in Eastbourne, which is quite far west and south of the area, but when people say Joe Marler I hear John Pertwee’s Worzel Gummidge in my head.
2. In retrospect I’ve heard him on sports radio and he was genuinely worth listening to, so grinding through him reading this out like he was taking a test at school is painful.
3. He was a fat kid (his words) and in three short chapters he mentions it a fucking million times.
4. I don’t give a flying fuck about his hair style.
5. It was honestly preventing me from concentrating on whatever I was doing at the time – driving, pretending to work, writing reviews for this blog**, etc., but not in a good way.

I’m in danger of starting a landslide of negativity here, so I’ll stop, just as I stopped listening. I don’t want to think poorly of Joe, but this audiobook is not good. Garrero mentions Joe’s brazenly poor attempts at accents as something funny, but it’s not. It would have been better if he’d read it like he speaks, but he didn’t. I got as far as Alun Wyn Jones outsmarting him and him throwing the entire England team under the bus for not following him up to the Haka at a New Zealand game (which was his mistake not theirs and which permitted an Owen Farrell smirk so grotesque that I think that was the point I began actively hating that prick***), and I thought I might just have better things to do.

Don’t let me persuade you not to read/listen to this – maybe the written version would be better as you too could imagine it with a Bristolian accent – but it’s just not for me, and I am more than happy to wade through doughy rugby biographies.

*There are plenty of trashy, right-wing websites you can read to check up on this but the one I read was this one: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush/

**Shut up

***Just in my mind, not on social media or by sending him dead wading birds with a note asking if this was his sanderling

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