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n “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”n
I read a fair amount – I would say that those close to me, those who know me well, would say that reading is my life. They are not entirely wrong. Reading sustains me. I begin to physically shake if I haven’t read for a few days, the rare event that does occur once or twice a year when the schedule is unrelenting. But those that are the closest to me know that reading, books, all of that jazz, cannot wish, cannot ever hope to compare to Arsenal. If I was given the vile and abusive choice between not reading for a year and not watching Arsenal for a year, I would pack my library before the day was up. I’m sorry. Fuck off to the storage while I get the TV room ready, the game is almost on.
Being the way I am is a surreal experience. I have been an Arsenal fan since I was 6 or 7ish. I am now in my mid 20s. That means that for nearly 2 decades, I have been heavily indoctrinated in the cult that is Premier League football, the drug that is waking up at ungodly hours on my weekends in order to watch a drab 0-0 from my living room. Living in North America and being an Arsenal fan is an even weirder experience, seeing as I often meet 40-50 year old men who are Arsenal fans that have been supporting the team for five or six years, tops. So I often find myself giving advice, consoling, telling them it will be okay, that it was different, that it will always work out, that it will get better. Then they go back home to their families and kids and mortgages, while I go back home to do school work or read (depending on what the result has been). The story of my falling in love with Arsenal will have to wait for another day – I am only allotted a certain number of characters in a Goodreads review, and so I will keep this one a bit more concise.
There are moments in my life during which I attempt to paint a picture of my obsession, to tell others how it is to live my life tied to the whims and fancies of an abstract body situated in London, England, an institution that dictates so much of my day to day and whose schedule sets mine. In these moments, I get the eye rolls and I sense the disbelief. I am not trying to exaggerate for the sake of a piece written on Goodreads – I gain nothing in making others here believe in my state of mind. I am not adding flair and spice to my writing with hyperbole. I am addicted to this life and not many understand why. Nick Hornby understands it perfectly. I have never been so directly understood. A beam of light has shined on me. No doubt this is one of my favourite books of all time, if only because it showed me that I am not alone. That being said, I cannot in good faith recommend this to others readily. Why? Well, you may not give a damn about the intricacies of the game of football (and very specifically Arsenal); you may not understand the passion and this book may do nothing to further your understanding; you may find the premise unbelievable and the drama too fantastical, to all of which I say, fair enough. If you ever meet me in person and want to understand me deeper, then read this.
I couldn’t read this book without a pencil in my hand, and consequently the book is marked up beyond belief. Hornby’s words are better than my own, so I will use his quotes for the rest of the review. Feel free to read on if you want to – these dark necessities are part of my design.
“It’s in there all the time, looking for a way out.”
“What are you thinking about?’ she asks.
At this point I lie. I wasn’t thinking about Martin Amis or Gérard Depardieu or the Labour Party at all. But then, obsessives have no choice; they have to lie on occasions like this. If we told the truth every time, then we would be unable to maintain relationships with anyone from the real world. We would be left to rot with our Arsenal programmes or our collection of original blue-label Stax records or our King Charles spaniels, and our two-minute daydreams would become longer and longer and longer until we lost our jobs and stopped bathing and shaving and eating, and we would lie on the floor in our own filth rewinding the video again and again in an attempt to memorise by heart the whole of the commentary, including David Pleat’s expert analysis, for the night of 26th of May 1989. (You think I had to look the date up? Ha!) The truth is this: for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”
“Fever Pitch is an attempt to gain some kind of an angle on my obsession. Why has the relationship that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relationship I have made of my own free will? (I love my family dearly, but they were rather foisted on me, and I am no longer in touch with any of the friends I made before I was fourteen – apart from the only other Arsenal fan at school.) And why has this affinity managed to survive my periodic feelings of indifference, sorrow and very real hatred?”
“I have friends who will regard this as pretentious, self-serving nonsense, the kind of desperate justification one might expect from a man who has spent a huge chunk of his leisure time fretting miserably in the cold. They are particularly resistant to the idea because I tend to overestimate the metaphorical value of football, and therefore introduce it into conversations where it simply does not belong. I now accept that football has no relevance to the Falklands conflict, the Rushdie affair, the Gulf War, childbirth, the ozone layer, the poll tax, etc., etc., and I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who has had to listen to my pathetically strained analogies.”
“I was acutely aware of this, and so a new source of discomfort emerged: as Arsenal huffed and puffed their way towards 1–0 wins and nil-nil draws I wriggled with embarrassment, waiting for Dad to articulate his dissatisfaction. I had discovered after the Swindon game that loyalty, at least in football terms, was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with. Marriages are nowhere near as rigid – you won’t catch any Arsenal fans slipping off to Tottenham for a bit of extra-marital slap and tickle, and though divorce is a possibility (you can just stop going if things get too bad), getting hitched again is out of the question. There have been many times over the last twenty-three years when I have pored over the small print of my contract looking for a way out, but there isn’t one. Each humiliating defeat (Swindon, Tranmere, York, Walsall, Rotherham, Wrexham) must be borne with patience, fortitude and forbearance; there is simply nothing that can be done, and that is a realisation that can make you simply squirm with frustration.” [Alan's Comments: If you are reading this on the day that I post it, by the way, happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there. My dad has become a much more involved player in the matches, so I now look forward to watching the games with him, even if we end up arguing on the philosophy of football and life and the backpass - the darned backpass - for most of the 90 minutes.]
“I am aware, sometimes, in my group of Arsenal-supporting friends, of an understated but noticeable jockeying: none of us likes to be told something about the club that we didn’t know – an injury to one of the reserves, say, or an impending alteration to the shirt design, something crucial like that – by any of the others.”
“It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans (and it is real grief) is private – we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else – we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.”
“It is hard for me, and for many of us, to think of years as being self-contained, with a beginning on 1st January and an ending 365 days later. I was going to say that 1980 was a torpid, blank, directionless year for me but that would be wrong; it was 79/80 that was these things. Football fans talk like that: our years, our units of time, run from August to May (June and July don’t really happen, especially in years which end with an odd number and which therefore contain no World Cup or European Championship). Ask us for the best or the worst period in our lives and we will often answer with four figures – 66/67 for Manchester United fans, 67/68 for Manchester City fans, 69/70 for Everton fans, and so on – a silent slash in the middle of them the only concession to the calendar used elsewhere in the western world. We get drunk on New Year’s Eve, just as everyone else does, but really it is after the Cup Final in May that our mental clock is wound back, and we indulge in all the vows and regrets and renewals that ordinary people allow themselves at the end of the conventional year.”
“Part of it was my own latent depression, permanently looking for a way out and liking what it saw at Highbury that night; but even more than that, I was as usual looking to Arsenal to show me that things did not stay bad for ever, that it was possible to change patterns, that losing streaks did not last. Arsenal, however, had other ideas: they seemed to want to show me that troughs could indeed be permanent, that some people, like some clubs, just couldn’t ever find ways out of the rooms they had locked themselves into. It seemed to me that night and for the next few days that we had both of us made too many wrong choices, and had let things slide for far too long, for anything ever to come right; I was back with the feeling, much deeper and much more frightening this time, that I was chained to the club, and thus to this miserable half-life, forever.
I was stunned and exhausted by the defeat (2–1, although the one came in the last minute, and we were well beaten by then): the next morning a girlfriend phoned me at work, and, hearing the tired dejection in my voice, asked me what was wrong. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ I asked her pitifully. She sounded worried and then, when I told her what had happened, I could hear, just for a second, relief – so it wasn’t, after all, the things she had momentarily feared for me – before she remembered who she was talking to, and the relief was replaced by all the sympathy she could muster. I knew she didn’t really understand this sort of pain, and I wouldn’t have had the courage to explain it to her; because this idea, that there was this log-jam, this impasse, and that until Arsenal sorted themselves out then neither could I… this idea was stupid and reprehensible (it gave a whole new meaning to relegation) and, worse than that, I knew now that I really did believe it.”
“The things that I have often tried to explain to people about football – that it is not an escape, or a form of entertainment, but a different version of the world – were clear for her to see; I felt vindicated, somehow.”
“One thing I know for sure about being a fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary, and those who say that they would rather do than watch are missing the point. Football is a context where watching becomes doing – not in the aerobic sense, because watching a game, smoking your head off while doing so, drinking after it has finished and eating chips on the way home is unlikely to do you a whole lot of Jane Fonda good, in the way that chuffing up and down a pitch is supposed to. But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team’s fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps at Wembley to meet Princess Diana. The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is consumed must realise this above all things. The players are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nonetheless, and sometimes if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them. I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me; and I say this fully aware that the club exploits me, disregards my views, and treats me shoddily on occasions, so my feeling of organic connection is not built on a muddle-headed and sentimental misunderstanding of how professional football works. This Wembley win belonged to me every bit as much as it belonged to Charlie Nicholas or George Graham (does Nicholas, who was dropped by Graham right at the start of the following season, and then sold, remember the afternoon as fondly?), and I worked every bit as hard for it as they did. The only difference between me and them is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them, and so had a better understanding of the afternoon, a sweeter appreciation of why the sun still shines when I remember it.”
Thank you Mr. Hornby.
I read a fair amount – I would say that those close to me, those who know me well, would say that reading is my life. They are not entirely wrong. Reading sustains me. I begin to physically shake if I haven’t read for a few days, the rare event that does occur once or twice a year when the schedule is unrelenting. But those that are the closest to me know that reading, books, all of that jazz, cannot wish, cannot ever hope to compare to Arsenal. If I was given the vile and abusive choice between not reading for a year and not watching Arsenal for a year, I would pack my library before the day was up. I’m sorry. Fuck off to the storage while I get the TV room ready, the game is almost on.
Being the way I am is a surreal experience. I have been an Arsenal fan since I was 6 or 7ish. I am now in my mid 20s. That means that for nearly 2 decades, I have been heavily indoctrinated in the cult that is Premier League football, the drug that is waking up at ungodly hours on my weekends in order to watch a drab 0-0 from my living room. Living in North America and being an Arsenal fan is an even weirder experience, seeing as I often meet 40-50 year old men who are Arsenal fans that have been supporting the team for five or six years, tops. So I often find myself giving advice, consoling, telling them it will be okay, that it was different, that it will always work out, that it will get better. Then they go back home to their families and kids and mortgages, while I go back home to do school work or read (depending on what the result has been). The story of my falling in love with Arsenal will have to wait for another day – I am only allotted a certain number of characters in a Goodreads review, and so I will keep this one a bit more concise.
There are moments in my life during which I attempt to paint a picture of my obsession, to tell others how it is to live my life tied to the whims and fancies of an abstract body situated in London, England, an institution that dictates so much of my day to day and whose schedule sets mine. In these moments, I get the eye rolls and I sense the disbelief. I am not trying to exaggerate for the sake of a piece written on Goodreads – I gain nothing in making others here believe in my state of mind. I am not adding flair and spice to my writing with hyperbole. I am addicted to this life and not many understand why. Nick Hornby understands it perfectly. I have never been so directly understood. A beam of light has shined on me. No doubt this is one of my favourite books of all time, if only because it showed me that I am not alone. That being said, I cannot in good faith recommend this to others readily. Why? Well, you may not give a damn about the intricacies of the game of football (and very specifically Arsenal); you may not understand the passion and this book may do nothing to further your understanding; you may find the premise unbelievable and the drama too fantastical, to all of which I say, fair enough. If you ever meet me in person and want to understand me deeper, then read this.
I couldn’t read this book without a pencil in my hand, and consequently the book is marked up beyond belief. Hornby’s words are better than my own, so I will use his quotes for the rest of the review. Feel free to read on if you want to – these dark necessities are part of my design.
“It’s in there all the time, looking for a way out.”
“What are you thinking about?’ she asks.
At this point I lie. I wasn’t thinking about Martin Amis or Gérard Depardieu or the Labour Party at all. But then, obsessives have no choice; they have to lie on occasions like this. If we told the truth every time, then we would be unable to maintain relationships with anyone from the real world. We would be left to rot with our Arsenal programmes or our collection of original blue-label Stax records or our King Charles spaniels, and our two-minute daydreams would become longer and longer and longer until we lost our jobs and stopped bathing and shaving and eating, and we would lie on the floor in our own filth rewinding the video again and again in an attempt to memorise by heart the whole of the commentary, including David Pleat’s expert analysis, for the night of 26th of May 1989. (You think I had to look the date up? Ha!) The truth is this: for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”
“Fever Pitch is an attempt to gain some kind of an angle on my obsession. Why has the relationship that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relationship I have made of my own free will? (I love my family dearly, but they were rather foisted on me, and I am no longer in touch with any of the friends I made before I was fourteen – apart from the only other Arsenal fan at school.) And why has this affinity managed to survive my periodic feelings of indifference, sorrow and very real hatred?”
“I have friends who will regard this as pretentious, self-serving nonsense, the kind of desperate justification one might expect from a man who has spent a huge chunk of his leisure time fretting miserably in the cold. They are particularly resistant to the idea because I tend to overestimate the metaphorical value of football, and therefore introduce it into conversations where it simply does not belong. I now accept that football has no relevance to the Falklands conflict, the Rushdie affair, the Gulf War, childbirth, the ozone layer, the poll tax, etc., etc., and I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who has had to listen to my pathetically strained analogies.”
“I was acutely aware of this, and so a new source of discomfort emerged: as Arsenal huffed and puffed their way towards 1–0 wins and nil-nil draws I wriggled with embarrassment, waiting for Dad to articulate his dissatisfaction. I had discovered after the Swindon game that loyalty, at least in football terms, was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with. Marriages are nowhere near as rigid – you won’t catch any Arsenal fans slipping off to Tottenham for a bit of extra-marital slap and tickle, and though divorce is a possibility (you can just stop going if things get too bad), getting hitched again is out of the question. There have been many times over the last twenty-three years when I have pored over the small print of my contract looking for a way out, but there isn’t one. Each humiliating defeat (Swindon, Tranmere, York, Walsall, Rotherham, Wrexham) must be borne with patience, fortitude and forbearance; there is simply nothing that can be done, and that is a realisation that can make you simply squirm with frustration.” [Alan's Comments: If you are reading this on the day that I post it, by the way, happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there. My dad has become a much more involved player in the matches, so I now look forward to watching the games with him, even if we end up arguing on the philosophy of football and life and the backpass - the darned backpass - for most of the 90 minutes.]
“I am aware, sometimes, in my group of Arsenal-supporting friends, of an understated but noticeable jockeying: none of us likes to be told something about the club that we didn’t know – an injury to one of the reserves, say, or an impending alteration to the shirt design, something crucial like that – by any of the others.”
“It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans (and it is real grief) is private – we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else – we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.”
“It is hard for me, and for many of us, to think of years as being self-contained, with a beginning on 1st January and an ending 365 days later. I was going to say that 1980 was a torpid, blank, directionless year for me but that would be wrong; it was 79/80 that was these things. Football fans talk like that: our years, our units of time, run from August to May (June and July don’t really happen, especially in years which end with an odd number and which therefore contain no World Cup or European Championship). Ask us for the best or the worst period in our lives and we will often answer with four figures – 66/67 for Manchester United fans, 67/68 for Manchester City fans, 69/70 for Everton fans, and so on – a silent slash in the middle of them the only concession to the calendar used elsewhere in the western world. We get drunk on New Year’s Eve, just as everyone else does, but really it is after the Cup Final in May that our mental clock is wound back, and we indulge in all the vows and regrets and renewals that ordinary people allow themselves at the end of the conventional year.”
“Part of it was my own latent depression, permanently looking for a way out and liking what it saw at Highbury that night; but even more than that, I was as usual looking to Arsenal to show me that things did not stay bad for ever, that it was possible to change patterns, that losing streaks did not last. Arsenal, however, had other ideas: they seemed to want to show me that troughs could indeed be permanent, that some people, like some clubs, just couldn’t ever find ways out of the rooms they had locked themselves into. It seemed to me that night and for the next few days that we had both of us made too many wrong choices, and had let things slide for far too long, for anything ever to come right; I was back with the feeling, much deeper and much more frightening this time, that I was chained to the club, and thus to this miserable half-life, forever.
I was stunned and exhausted by the defeat (2–1, although the one came in the last minute, and we were well beaten by then): the next morning a girlfriend phoned me at work, and, hearing the tired dejection in my voice, asked me what was wrong. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ I asked her pitifully. She sounded worried and then, when I told her what had happened, I could hear, just for a second, relief – so it wasn’t, after all, the things she had momentarily feared for me – before she remembered who she was talking to, and the relief was replaced by all the sympathy she could muster. I knew she didn’t really understand this sort of pain, and I wouldn’t have had the courage to explain it to her; because this idea, that there was this log-jam, this impasse, and that until Arsenal sorted themselves out then neither could I… this idea was stupid and reprehensible (it gave a whole new meaning to relegation) and, worse than that, I knew now that I really did believe it.”
“The things that I have often tried to explain to people about football – that it is not an escape, or a form of entertainment, but a different version of the world – were clear for her to see; I felt vindicated, somehow.”
“One thing I know for sure about being a fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary, and those who say that they would rather do than watch are missing the point. Football is a context where watching becomes doing – not in the aerobic sense, because watching a game, smoking your head off while doing so, drinking after it has finished and eating chips on the way home is unlikely to do you a whole lot of Jane Fonda good, in the way that chuffing up and down a pitch is supposed to. But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team’s fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps at Wembley to meet Princess Diana. The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is consumed must realise this above all things. The players are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nonetheless, and sometimes if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them. I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me; and I say this fully aware that the club exploits me, disregards my views, and treats me shoddily on occasions, so my feeling of organic connection is not built on a muddle-headed and sentimental misunderstanding of how professional football works. This Wembley win belonged to me every bit as much as it belonged to Charlie Nicholas or George Graham (does Nicholas, who was dropped by Graham right at the start of the following season, and then sold, remember the afternoon as fondly?), and I worked every bit as hard for it as they did. The only difference between me and them is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them, and so had a better understanding of the afternoon, a sweeter appreciation of why the sun still shines when I remember it.”
Thank you Mr. Hornby.
