From an article I wrote on prbsports.com

I am currently reading a book by the writer Nick Hornby called Fever Pitch. It is probably the best Football book I have ever read and the style in which all footballing books should be written. I am into the final few pages of it now and am not looking forward to it coming to an end.

The book is basically an autobiography of Hornby’s life based around his memories of Arsenal games — the team is supports to an obsessive level — through the late-sixties, seventies and eighties all the way to Arsenal’s dramatic league win over Liverpool in May ‘89 thanks to Michael Thomas. Even as a Liverpool fan I find the book a brilliant read and any football fan will relate to the vast majority of stories within the book. Even non-fans of the game will gain a greater respect of what kind of animal the footballing fan is. The great thing about the book though is that it is more about the observing of the game rather than just talking about various matches. It is the kind of style you get now-a-days from various sports bloggers when they write about their own personal viewing of games rather than objective reports which you get in mainstream media. No doubt Hornby was ahead of his time. Go buy it.

As the cover says: In America, it is soccer. But in Great Britain, it is the real football. No pads, no prayers, no prisoners. And that is before the players even take the field.

One of the best sections of the book is from the chapter ‘No Apology Necessary’ were Hornby talks about what makes football great and what separates the game from nearly every other sport. The following is an extract from that section…

Absurdly, I haven’t yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men (watch Beardsley against Adams) in a way that they can’t in other contact sports, and the way that the best team does not necessarily win. And there’s the athleticism (with all due respect to Ian Botham and the England front row, there are very few good fat footballers), and the way that strength and intelligence have to combine. It allows players to look beautiful and balletic in a way that some sports do not: a perfectly-timed diving header, or a perfectly-struck volley, allow the body to achieve a poise and grace that some sportsmen can never exhibit.

But there’s even more to it than all that. During matches like the Everton semi-final, although nights like that are inevitably rare, there is this powerful sensation of being exactly in the right place at the right time; when I am at Highbury on a big night, or, of course, Wembley on an even bigger afternoon, I feel as though I am at the centre of the whole world. When else does this happen in life? Maybe you’ve got a hot ticket for the first night of an Andrew Lloyd Webber show, but you know that the show is going to run for years and years, so you’d actually have to tell people afterwards that you saw it before they did, which is kind of uncool and in any case completely ruins the effect. Or maybe you saw the Stones at Wembley, but then even something like that is repeated for night after night nowadays, and consequently doesn’t have the same one-off impact of a football match. It’s not news, in the same way that an Arsenal v Everton semi-final is news: when you look at your newspaper the next day, whichever one you read, there will be extensive space given over to an account of your evening, the evening to which you contributed simply by turning up and shouting.

You just can’t find this outside a football ground, there is nowhere else you can be in the entire country that will make you feel as though you are at the heart of things. Because whichever nightclub you go to, or play, or film, or whichever concert you see, or restaurant you eat at, life will have been going on elsewhere in your absence, as it always does; but when I am at Highbury for games like these, I feel that the rest of the world has stopped and is gathered outside the gates, waiting to hear the final score.

— Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, Copyright © 1992, Nick Hornby

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