The Club

The play “the club” is about an Australian football team over the season. Basically the play is about a club who pays a man “Jeff Hayward” lot of money to play for the team, he accepts but does not play well. This affects the coach “Laurie Holden”, whose coaching days is soon to be over with so many lost games. “Ted parker the president of the team is forced the resign because of an incident including him abusing a stripper. “Laurie” also discovers that the club is also thinking of giving him the sack so he tries to get Jeff Hayward to play better in the games. “Jock riley” is jealous of Laurie because he almost broke his record of 282 games; he also lost a game because of the alcohol. Laurie told the team that he was drunk and then soon after he became the new coach. Jock tried to ruin the team to get revenge on Laurie.

Ted Parker does not reflect the image of a typical club president; he has no football background, but loves the club. Ted is ruled by his emotions and has difficulty hiding them when in an argument; he usually uses alcohol to balance things out. He associates rejection with respect; if he is rejected by other his does not show them respect. There are two obvious examples of this issue in the play. Firstly the team’s refusal of him not having a football background. Danny asks that the player’s point of view to be well thought-out and teds response to that was “the players can go to hell”.

The response shows anger towards the players and implies that the players are all lower than him and do not have the power that he holds. Ted parker also thinks that the players can’t have his respect. Laurie uses simple sentences, this shows a wish to not communicate or be involved with ted. Then Ted reinforces his power over the players when he says “ I was elected by the members to lead this club and ill bloody well lead it, and if anybody tried to stop me ill crush them” this again shows that he carries a lot of angry, but mainly showing his sensitivity...