Comment

Part of your assignment is to comment on how the other characters in “Sports Leader” by Jane Rogers view the boy. The other characters in the short story that express an opinion about the boy are: Eileen (his foster mother), Phil (his employer), Dan (the bartender), his clients, and Martin and his mother.

Eileen’s attitude towards the boy suggests that she considers him rather naïve and a burden. She wants him to get a job and earn his own living, and she thinks about the time he will no longer be in her care:

He had his head in the clouds. That’s what his foster mum said. He’d spent September and October trailing about not finding a job, and Eileen was sick of him parked in front of the telly. She didn’t want him thinking the world owed him a living. (ll. 3-6)

Furthermore, she is very persuasive about the job and about the boy going out to collect money, which suggests that she prefers not having him in the house all the time:

Eileen told him he needed to stand on his own two feet. He’d be in a place of his own in eighteen months. And it wasn’t bad work, like she said, at least he was out in fresh air; at least there’d be tips, come Christmas. (ll. 8-11)

Phil considers the boy slow but reliable. He is not particularly pleased to work with the boy, but he accepts him eventually: “In Phil’s opinion the new boy was not a lot of use. He was that slow, he was doing one house to Phil’s five....