Notes from our 'Resident Writer' - Steve Kellett

'We're Gonna Win the Cup' 

Doncaster Rovers featured in a new play which was performed at Doncaster's Civic Theatre in September 2004. Writer and director, Steve Kellett, tells us how he came to write the play.

Just imagine if a Rovers supporter's wife gave him an ultimatum: Choose her or the Rovers! Well of course he would miss her wouldn't he? Or probably he'd do what most of us have done over the years and compromise - for a while at least.

I have seen this scenario enacted in so many relationships that I decided to write a play about the dilemma and see what might happen if a man's obsession with his football team was tested to breaking point. The play is a comedy called 'We're Gonna Win the Cup'.

The idea for this play was hatched on F.A. cup final day 1993. A local team was in the final but it was Sheffield Wednesday and not, as I have dreamed for forty odd years, Doncaster Rovers. I foolishly told a friend about this dream who, after he'd stopped laughing, said that the only way Doncaster Rovers would ever reach the cup final was if someone wrote a play about it. So I did.

The play is actually about relationships and is set against the background of a Rovers' cup run. But I have often felt that a man's relationship with his football team is often the strongest of them all. It's usually a man. At the time that I was forging my relationship with Doncaster Rovers the girls that I knew were developing even stronger passions for the Beatles or the Monkeys, but theirs was a fickle, transitory interest that soon waned. Some would argue that girls simply grow up but, of course, it's much more complex than that. A man is more likely to divorce his wife than change his allegiance to his football team.

Most boys are taken to see a football match for the first time by their dads and it's a rite of passage. There can be no other team once he has introduced you to your tribe, it's one of those unbreakable bonds that you forge in life: Father and son; man and football team. So for better or worse - usually worse but things are looking up - I'm Rovers till I die!

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