Bottle It Up

Call it what you want — minerals, bollocks, cojones, testicular fortitude, mettle, mentality, or bottle. They’ve all come to mean the same thing, though ‘bottle’ appears to be the one that’s stuck around for the longest now. For ‘Bottlejob’, see Leeds United in 2017, 2019, 2023, or about a dozen times throughout our history.

These days, it’s not just confined to the stadium or the coffee chat at work. It’s in every social media post you come across being filled with memes, Joy Division being played relentlessly, and ‘DJ Femi’ type banter from energy drink-fuelled football club social media admins.

Fear of the bottlejob is almost worse than the bottlejob itself. But when you distil it down, what really is ‘bottle’?

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