The Football Match Something very queer is happening in that narrow thoroughfare to the west of the town. A grey-green
tide flows sluggishly down its length. It is a tide of cloth caps.
These caps have just left the ground of the Bruddersford United Association Football Club. To say that
these men paid their shilling to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood
and catgut, that "Hamlet" is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United A.F.C. offered
you Conflict and Art; it turned you into a critic, happy in your judgement of fine points, ready in a second to
estimate the worth of a well-judged pass, a run down the touch line, a lightning shot, a clearance kick by
back or goal-keeper; it turned you into a partisan, holding your breath when the ball came sailing into your
own goalmouth, ecstatic when your forwards raced away towards the opposite goal, elated, downcast, bitter,
triumphant by turns at the fortunes of your side, watching a ball shape Iliads and Odysseys for you; and
what is more, it turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half,
for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles,
sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped
with most of your mates and your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were, cheering together,
thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgements like lords of the earth, having pushed your
way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life, hurting with Conflict and yet
passionate and beautiful in its Art. Moreover, it offered you more than a shilling's worth of material for talk
during the rest of the week. (From "Good Companions" by J. B. Priestley. Abridged)
Мне надо англиский summary.

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