Are there any books summing up the 86 WC written after the event?
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Yes, but it's terrible. Under the Midday Sun. See the world Cup books thread.Originally posted by Sunderporinostesta View PostComment
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So I've been reading more football lit what with the WC on and all. Here are two books I've managed since the start of the knock-out round.
First, the Defiant: A History of Football Against Fascism by Chris Lee of the Outside Wright blog. I am not really sure about this one. Basically, it goes region-by-region through the white bits of the world, to talk about football's relationship to fascism. Except the author is kind of hard-up for source material: this is all secondary research with a few interviews with authors of the books he's read (eg Soccer Under the Swastika; Ajax, the Dutch the War, etc). So what you end up with is a series of chapters which are more or less identically structured: dealing with football in the 1930s/40s under dictatorships or occupation, and then a 30-40 year jump to the arrival of fascism on the terraces in the 70s/80s/90s (varies a bit from one country to another) and then takes a left-turn into the growing European movement of *anti-capitalist* (mainly community-owned non-league) teams, which, while there is some overlap, is not really conceptually the same thing (and in any case was covered in much more depth by Gabriel Kuhn in Soccer vs. the State)
Anyways, there's almost nothing new here (though I did learn that one of these non-league against-modern-football clubs in Florence is called CS Lebowski, and yes, it's named after what you think it is), but if for some reason you're yearning for a quick read about *both* football's clashes with fascist governments and fascist fams over the past 80 years, this book would be fine. It's a step above most Pitch books, anyway.
Second, Thou Shall not Pass: the Anatomy of Football's Centre Half by Leo Moynihan. I am not sure what to make of this book, really. It's awfully UK-centric in its outlook (the title is a give-away - I am fairly sure that in no other language are defenders referred to by the name they had when they played a different position over 70 years ago). Not exclusively so - on the couple of occasions it leaves UK shores it does OK, but boy is there a lot of material about "hard men" and "leaders" and "got to be able to play a wet wednesday night in Stoke" (the author does not actually use this term, but you know what I mean) etc.
And in the end? There's not much a conclusion here. There are lots of different types of defenders: big, small, tactically gifted, agricultral, etc, and all these styles can succeed provided the players are dedicated and selfless, have complementary players around them in the squad and have coaches who can get the best out of them. So the book is arguably less an "anatomy" than a "taxonomy". But it is reasonably reasonably snappy (185 pages), which I think is a big plus in a book like this.Last edited by Anton Gramscescu; 11-12-2022, 18:04.Comment
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Some pieces on Centro Storico Lebowski
https://thinkingcity.org/2018/12/09/...f-cs-lebowski/
https://www.theguardian.com/football...e_iOSApp_Other
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I wonder how far they go in their adulation of this character. I would love it if their chants were made up of things like "this will not stand, man" or "we hate the fucking Eagles" (maybe they can save that for a future fixture with Benfica).
"You're out of your element, <insert visiting side here>" would work as well.Comment
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I just finished The Farther Corner by Harry Pearson and it was, of course, delightful.Comment
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David Conn's FIFA book is glorious. For some reason I'd expected his writing to be dull but in fact it flows beautifully and with a great deal of love for the game that FIFA has dragged through the mire.Comment
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I’m about half way through Daniel Gray’s ‘Silence Of The Stands’ and it’s as well written as you would expect. Gray, like Harry Pearson, has a turn of phrase and an unapologetic sentimentality towards the game’s past that I always find it easy to fall for. I look upon it as an antidote to the Netflix FIFA documentary, this is a book that allows a football lover to dream, just for a little while.Comment
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I'm getting ready to start the last chapter. It's bee a very enjoyable read. As you say, there is a romantic sentimentality to his writing after the first book, which seemed more historically focused and the writing was a bit more straight forward. This book continues the aesthetic that began with Saturday, 3pm. To extend Tony C's comments: the book focuses on seeing mostly non-league matches during periods after COVID and limited numbers of fans were allowed at football grounds. Shtudown again (where he attended matches as a journalist). And then limited numbers of fans were allowed in again. Most chapters start with some cultural and/or historical context via a narrative about a person or the town. Then a more literary match report. Later the match report is followed by some other relevant reflection. The chapter that ends with a walk through Bootham Crescent and some discussion of York City as a second team is wonderful. That section is worth the cover price alone. Again, I have one more chapter to go. I don't know if anything different will happen during that last chapter, but the book has been an enjoyable plane and train read during Christmas travel and now during gray winter commutes.Originally posted by Tony C View PostComment
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I think most Athletic stuff is behind a paywall, but luckily this is not. It's a couple years old, but a nice piece in anticipation of the The Farther Corner:
https://theathletic.com/2040013/2020...st-non-league/Comment
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Friday night, Dunston, on the industrial and post-industrial Gateshead flank of the River Tyne — as a late summer sunset sinks like a pint over where the Federation Brewery used to be, Dunston UTS are hosting Blyth Spartans in a pre-season friendly.
The first leaves of autumn on are on the pitch; the 200-capacity crowd has been temperature-tested; entrance is a fiver; the football is committed and the atmosphere restrained. While there will be some who would not consider this the perfect way to kickstart a weekend, Harry Pearson is not one of them.
“Blyth haven’t brought many,” he sniffs. There is a knowing smile.
Pearson is at ease, leaning on a Northern Premier League club’s perimeter fence of which, his many devotees will be unsurprised to hear, he has extensive knowledge. “I always feel quite happy when I’m here, especially when the lights are on,” he says.
“I feel at home. The people here; you don’t know them but you do know them. It feels like everyone knows you. It’s like Cheers, except they don’t know your name. Though I haven’t had a pie. That used to be the highlight of my week. Until I met a woman. Going to a game and having a pie. That was my salvation.”
He pauses. “Best not contemplate it too much.”
The contemplation of such scenes, however, is what Pearson does best. In the 1993-94 season, Pearson was here to watch Dunston Federation Brewery, as they were known, face Billingham Synthonia in a second qualifying round FA Cup tie. It became the third game in Pearson’s landmark book, The Far Corner, and the “match report” (informing us that the visitors were named after a fertiliser) began with what we have come to know as A Very Harry Pearson Digression.
“I suspect that in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when Kurtz cries out ‘The horror! The horror!’, he is not recoiling from the black void at the centre of the human soul but simply recalling a trip to the Gateshead Metro Centre.”
Twenty-five years on, Pearson returned to places such as Dunston and Darlington and the Metro Centre for a sequel, The Farther Corner. North east Step 7 and 8 football and their surrounds is where Pearson mines his lines. On the way to Consett versus Newton Aycliffe, he walks past a supermarket “with a large sign reading: ‘There is no lead on this roof.”
Despite various offers to do it sooner, it took Pearson a quarter of a century to return to this subject in book form. In part it was because he was writing other award-winning books on cricket and cycling; in part it was because he was writing columns for The Guardian and elsewhere; in part, it was because he did not want to encroach on The Far Corner.
Even a modest man like Pearson understands that it isn’t a book people simply read, laughed along with and forgot about. It was something they cherished, smiled at when they saw it on the bookcase. It is a loved book.
It hit Pearson one night at a reading on Teesside. “I was with my dad, actually, a former steelworker. The fact I’d written a book, he was proud of that, but a bloke comes up to us and said he worked at Lackenby steelworks and that he’d only read one book since he’d left school. It was this one – ‘and I’ve read it twice’.
“I remember my dad was, like, ‘Really…’. If I’d got a fantastic review in the London Review of Books, he’d go: ‘What a load of poncey intellectuals’. But for a man from Lackenby steelworks to say that, that was something. I realised it had touched people. You don’t really think about it, though, do you?”
Given this affection, The Farther Corner could be considered that difficult second album. Pearson pulls it off; it is excellent. He retains his ear, which is what he writes with. It is reassuring that the fourth sentence of The Farther Corner is: “’You can’t really enjoy football unless you’ve a coat on,’ the bloke behind me said.”
It was early August in east Newcastle.
The gems that studded every page of The Far Corner are in good company:
“The train strike dragged on like a Garth Crooks question.”
“Success has been as rare as My Little Pony manure.”
“Stuart Boam — a man whose tackling teetered on the edge of manslaughter.”
Pearson’s interest in Stuart Boam stems from his lifelong support of Middlesbrough and the epilogue in The Far Corner is about Boro’s appointment of Bryan Robson as manager. It is where we were, and Pearson was over the moon.
In 2020, Pearson is still slightly stunned a superhero like Robson had agreed to become Boro player-manager, though not as stunned as he is by Robson’s unveiling outfit — shirt, tie and suit jacket combined with Boro shorts and socks. “That was his normal Saturday night outfit,” Pearson says. “I think.
“Bryan Robson — he was a superstar, a bloody good footballer. He’s one of those players, if you saw him on television, it didn’t quite come across. Seeing him at a game was fantastic. He never missed a pass, like Bobby Murdoch when he was at Middlesbrough.
“What no one could have predicted is how much football would change from that point. The new stadiums, foreign players. In 1994, if you’d said to me within this decade Middlesbrough will sign Brazil’s footballer of the year (Juninho) and the star striker from Juventus (Fabrizio Ravanelli), I’d have said, ‘What?’ but within five years, it had happened. Boro signing Ravanelli is like them signing Kingsley Coman today. There was no hint we were on the cusp of this huge change. Bryan Robson coming to Middesbrough; that was the huge change.”
The scale of change, or its pace or its absence, these are inevitable topics in a sequel. A droll man like Pearson will always seek and find the humour in a situation but to re-read The Far Corner is to notice afresh some subtle social commentary. In The Farther Corner, it is easier to see.
Football has changed, the north east has changed. In 1994, Middlesbrough played at Ayresome Park, Sunderland played at Roker Park and as Pearson says over the fence at Dunston, Blyth Spartans were sponsored by the comic Viz. “Viz wanted to put ‘Drink Beer, Smoke Tabs’ on the jersey but weren’t allowed.”
The famous green-and-white stripes of Blyth Spartans — and their name — had captured Pearson’s imagination growing up; a football-obsessed boy on Teesside. Blyth also thrilled the north east with an FA Cup run to the fifth round in 1978 and such memories were in his mind when discussing writing The Far Corner with a London publisher.
“I was writing for When Saturday Comes,” Pearson says. “My partner was from Herefordshire and she wanted to move there. I thought if I go there, there’s no football. Well, there is, but I knew if went back to the north east, there’d be football aplenty.
“We moved into this little cottage in the middle of nowhere. The man next door, John Ferguson, was a big Sunderland fan. He’s in his nineties now; been to watch Sunderland when Raich Carter played. John Ferguson had seen Sunderland win the League title.”
Pearson started going to games with Ferguson and his son. He throws in the nugget that Sunderland’s manager, Johnny Cochrane, remains the last man called John to manage England’s league champions.
“When I originally pitched the book, I’d said it would mainly be about Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Sunderland, though I did say there’d be non-League and the Northern League and its great tradition, (which I knew nothing about). Then I went to Whitley Bay and the crowd were just so funny,” he says. “I was hooked. I didn’t mention to the publisher that 75 per cent of the book would be about clubs where there were crowds of less than 200. I don’t think he’d have said: ‘Yes! Let’s publish that’. It’s just how it worked out.”
Pearson mixed Premier League with Football League with Northern League and County Durham and FA Cup ties to produce a classic. This time, he has jettisoned the Premier League clubs and when he visits Darlington and Hartlepool United, they are no longer Football League clubs. This is no glory hunt.
“I’ve been asked quite often to do versions of it, asked to do books about the north west,” he says. “I’m just not interested and in a way, that’s a bad thing, but I feel I know this area. It’s 25 years and another thing was that people in their thirties started getting in touch, they’d started reading it. I think there’s a renewed interest in non-League football among younger fans. Crowds are quite big now, especially in the south; you’ve Dulwich Hamlet, Lewes. I started getting interview requests from podcasts and magazines. It made me think. And I’d been going to the Northern League the whole way through.”
Pearson is wary of nostalgia, now a full-blown sector of the cultural economy, but looking back is inevitable in this work.
“It’s weird,” he says. “It’s that thing where everything you hoped would happen in football has happened and you now hate it. You wanted the grounds to be safer, you wanted better toilet facilities, food you could eat, a PA you could hear. And now you go: ‘Aw, why did we leave that behind?’.
“I remember being in the Fulwell End at Roker Park, in the Holgate End at Ayresome Park, with huge affection, probably because I was young. It’s partly that but you also had a connection with the past. You knew what you were experiencing there was what your grandad experienced. There was a commonality. Part of football was to feel that continuum of history. I miss that.
“St James’ Park is different because it’s still there but it’s unrecognisable. It’s like someone who’s had a massive facelift. Then you remember those walkways down from the Gallowgate End; unlit, really dangerous.”
The lack of major trophies has been one constant, though Middlesbrough, of course, won the 2004 League Cup and reached the UEFA Cup final two years later. Pearson was in Eindhoven to see them lose 4-0 to Seville. He was bewildered more by Middlesbrough’s presence there than by the scoreline.
“It seemed like a miracle,” he says, “whereas for a whole generation of Boro fans, that was their first experience. They feel deeply aggrieved by what there is now. A lot of my friends who were season ticket holders stopped going under (Aitor) Karanka, a man who aimed to stay in the Premier League by drawing every game 0-0. In the old days, you used to hear: ‘Go out there and for the first 20 minutes, quieten the crowd’ but Karanka was doing it at home. And for the first 90”
Along the way from 1993, the fan-as-consumer, a replica shirt-buyer, developed and Pearson also feels there has been a narrowing of fan focus.
“I think there’s a change in the way people follow football. People follow a club but they don’t really support football,” he says. “John Ferguson, he’d go to see Sunderland but when they were away, he’d go to non-League at Crook or somewhere, sometimes Middlesbrough. He and his son would go to football every Saturday because they loved football for the sake of football.
“It’s something I find now in the international break — when Newcastle aren’t playing, you’d expect non-League gates to go up but they barely do because people who watch Newcastle won’t go to watch Dunston. They have this thing, as I say in the book: ‘Oh, it’s the standard’, as if they’re fucking opera buffs.”
More broadly, the north east has undergone industrial and political change in these 25 years. In the introduction to his new book, Pearson writes: “This far corner of England had always seemed separate, now it felt increasingly abandoned.” It helps explain, he says, why so many voted for Brexit and why former Labour strongholds turned Conservative.
“I think changes in society are reflected in changes in football. There are people with huge sums of money and people with nothing, which wasn’t true in the 1990s. We’ve got food banks. That’s a change. It’s reflected in football; the gap between the haves and have-nots. I felt it more with this book than in The Far Corner.
“I sensed it when the Labour Party wouldn’t save Redcar steelworks. Gordon Brown said he could save the banks but not the steelworks. That’s when you thought, ‘Actually, you don’t give a fuck about here’. The fact people then voted Brexit; they were just slamming a door, giving a big two-fingered salute. That’s what it was.
“As you can imagine, as an ex-Guardian writer, I have a lot of liberal, left friends. They were saying these people are morons. But they’re not. I understand them. I don’t agree but I understand. If you go to Easington and see the state of it, you can blame it on (Margaret) Thatcher but Thatcher’s nearly as far away from us as the Second World War was when I wrote The Far Corner. Tony Blair was the MP 10-12 miles from Easington. He did nothing.
“Those people don’t go to these places. Football fans do. And what you have at Northern League clubs are working-class people running them. No one interferes, no one tells them what to do. They are left alone by the middle class, people like me, and they do it really well.”
Pearson started going to games with Ferguson and his son. He throws in the nugget that Sunderland’s manager, Johnny Cochrane, remains the last man called John to manage England’s league champions.
“When I originally pitched the book, I’d said it would mainly be about Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Sunderland, though I did say there’d be non-League and the Northern League and its great tradition, (which I knew nothing about). Then I went to Whitley Bay and the crowd were just so funny,” he says. “I was hooked. I didn’t mention to the publisher that 75 per cent of the book would be about clubs where there were crowds of less than 200. I don’t think he’d have said: ‘Yes! Let’s publish that’. It’s just how it worked out.”
Pearson mixed Premier League with Football League with Northern League and County Durham and FA Cup ties to produce a classic. This time, he has jettisoned the Premier League clubs and when he visits Darlington and Hartlepool United, they are no longer Football League clubs. This is no glory hunt.
“I’ve been asked quite often to do versions of it, asked to do books about the north west,” he says. “I’m just not interested and in a way, that’s a bad thing, but I feel I know this area. It’s 25 years and another thing was that people in their thirties started getting in touch, they’d started reading it. I think there’s a renewed interest in non-League football among younger fans. Crowds are quite big now, especially in the south; you’ve Dulwich Hamlet, Lewes. I started getting interview requests from podcasts and magazines. It made me think. And I’d been going to the Northern League the whole way through.”
Pearson is wary of nostalgia, now a full-blown sector of the cultural economy, but looking back is inevitable in this work.
“It’s weird,” he says. “It’s that thing where everything you hoped would happen in football has happened and you now hate it. You wanted the grounds to be safer, you wanted better toilet facilities, food you could eat, a PA you could hear. And now you go: ‘Aw, why did we leave that behind?’.
“I remember being in the Fulwell End at Roker Park, in the Holgate End at Ayresome Park, with huge affection, probably because I was young. It’s partly that but you also had a connection with the past. You knew what you were experiencing there was what your grandad experienced. There was a commonality. Part of football was to feel that continuum of history. I miss that.
“St James’ Park is different because it’s still there but it’s unrecognisable. It’s like someone who’s had a massive facelift. Then you remember those walkways down from the Gallowgate End; unlit, really dangerous.”
The lack of major trophies has been one constant, though Middlesbrough, of course, won the 2004 League Cup and reached the UEFA Cup final two years later. Pearson was in Eindhoven to see them lose 4-0 to Seville. He was bewildered more by Middlesbrough’s presence there than by the scoreline.
“It seemed like a miracle,” he says, “whereas for a whole generation of Boro fans, that was their first experience. They feel deeply aggrieved by what there is now. A lot of my friends who were season ticket holders stopped going under (Aitor) Karanka, a man who aimed to stay in the Premier League by drawing every game 0-0. In the old days, you used to hear: ‘Go out there and for the first 20 minutes, quieten the crowd’ but Karanka was doing it at home. And for the first 90”
Along the way from 1993, the fan-as-consumer, a replica shirt-buyer, developed and Pearson also feels there has been a narrowing of fan focus.
“I think there’s a change in the way people follow football. People follow a club but they don’t really support football,” he says. “John Ferguson, he’d go to see Sunderland but when they were away, he’d go to non-League at Crook or somewhere, sometimes Middlesbrough. He and his son would go to football every Saturday because they loved football for the sake of football.
“It’s something I find now in the international break — when Newcastle aren’t playing, you’d expect non-League gates to go up but they barely do because people who watch Newcastle won’t go to watch Dunston. They have this thing, as I say in the book: ‘Oh, it’s the standard’, as if they’re fucking opera buffs.”
More broadly, the north east has undergone industrial and political change in these 25 years. In the introduction to his new book, Pearson writes: “This far corner of England had always seemed separate, now it felt increasingly abandoned.” It helps explain, he says, why so many voted for Brexit and why former Labour strongholds turned Conservative.
“I think changes in society are reflected in changes in football. There are people with huge sums of money and people with nothing, which wasn’t true in the 1990s. We’ve got food banks. That’s a change. It’s reflected in football; the gap between the haves and have-nots. I felt it more with this book than in The Far Corner.
“I sensed it when the Labour Party wouldn’t save Redcar steelworks. Gordon Brown said he could save the banks but not the steelworks. That’s when you thought, ‘Actually, you don’t give a fuck about here’. The fact people then voted Brexit; they were just slamming a door, giving a big two-fingered salute. That’s what it was.
“As you can imagine, as an ex-Guardian writer, I have a lot of liberal, left friends. They were saying these people are morons. But they’re not. I understand them. I don’t agree but I understand. If you go to Easington and see the state of it, you can blame it on (Margaret) Thatcher but Thatcher’s nearly as far away from us as the Second World War was when I wrote The Far Corner. Tony Blair was the MP 10-12 miles from Easington. He did nothing.
“Those people don’t go to these places. Football fans do. And what you have at Northern League clubs are working-class people running them. No one interferes, no one tells them what to do. They are left alone by the middle class, people like me, and they do it really well.”
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Pearson started going to games with Ferguson and his son. He throws in the nugget that Sunderland’s manager, Johnny Cochrane, remains the last man called John to manage England’s league champions.
“When I originally pitched the book, I’d said it would mainly be about Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Sunderland, though I did say there’d be non-League and the Northern League and its great tradition, (which I knew nothing about). Then I went to Whitley Bay and the crowd were just so funny,” he says. “I was hooked. I didn’t mention to the publisher that 75 per cent of the book would be about clubs where there were crowds of less than 200. I don’t think he’d have said: ‘Yes! Let’s publish that’. It’s just how it worked out.”
Pearson mixed Premier League with Football League with Northern League and County Durham and FA Cup ties to produce a classic. This time, he has jettisoned the Premier League clubs and when he visits Darlington and Hartlepool United, they are no longer Football League clubs. This is no glory hunt.
“I’ve been asked quite often to do versions of it, asked to do books about the north west,” he says. “I’m just not interested and in a way, that’s a bad thing, but I feel I know this area. It’s 25 years and another thing was that people in their thirties started getting in touch, they’d started reading it. I think there’s a renewed interest in non-League football among younger fans. Crowds are quite big now, especially in the south; you’ve Dulwich Hamlet, Lewes. I started getting interview requests from podcasts and magazines. It made me think. And I’d been going to the Northern League the whole way through.”
Pearson is wary of nostalgia, now a full-blown sector of the cultural economy, but looking back is inevitable in this work.
“It’s weird,” he says. “It’s that thing where everything you hoped would happen in football has happened and you now hate it. You wanted the grounds to be safer, you wanted better toilet facilities, food you could eat, a PA you could hear. And now you go: ‘Aw, why did we leave that behind?’.
“I remember being in the Fulwell End at Roker Park, in the Holgate End at Ayresome Park, with huge affection, probably because I was young. It’s partly that but you also had a connection with the past. You knew what you were experiencing there was what your grandad experienced. There was a commonality. Part of football was to feel that continuum of history. I miss that.
“St James’ Park is different because it’s still there but it’s unrecognisable. It’s like someone who’s had a massive facelift. Then you remember those walkways down from the Gallowgate End; unlit, really dangerous.”
The lack of major trophies has been one constant, though Middlesbrough, of course, won the 2004 League Cup and reached the UEFA Cup final two years later. Pearson was in Eindhoven to see them lose 4-0 to Seville. He was bewildered more by Middlesbrough’s presence there than by the scoreline.
“It seemed like a miracle,” he says, “whereas for a whole generation of Boro fans, that was their first experience. They feel deeply aggrieved by what there is now. A lot of my friends who were season ticket holders stopped going under (Aitor) Karanka, a man who aimed to stay in the Premier League by drawing every game 0-0. In the old days, you used to hear: ‘Go out there and for the first 20 minutes, quieten the crowd’ but Karanka was doing it at home. And for the first 90”
Along the way from 1993, the fan-as-consumer, a replica shirt-buyer, developed and Pearson also feels there has been a narrowing of fan focus.
“I think there’s a change in the way people follow football. People follow a club but they don’t really support football,” he says. “John Ferguson, he’d go to see Sunderland but when they were away, he’d go to non-League at Crook or somewhere, sometimes Middlesbrough. He and his son would go to football every Saturday because they loved football for the sake of football.
“It’s something I find now in the international break — when Newcastle aren’t playing, you’d expect non-League gates to go up but they barely do because people who watch Newcastle won’t go to watch Dunston. They have this thing, as I say in the book: ‘Oh, it’s the standard’, as if they’re fucking opera buffs.”
More broadly, the north east has undergone industrial and political change in these 25 years. In the introduction to his new book, Pearson writes: “This far corner of England had always seemed separate, now it felt increasingly abandoned.” It helps explain, he says, why so many voted for Brexit and why former Labour strongholds turned Conservative.
“I think changes in society are reflected in changes in football. There are people with huge sums of money and people with nothing, which wasn’t true in the 1990s. We’ve got food banks. That’s a change. It’s reflected in football; the gap between the haves and have-nots. I felt it more with this book than in The Far Corner.
“I sensed it when the Labour Party wouldn’t save Redcar steelworks. Gordon Brown said he could save the banks but not the steelworks. That’s when you thought, ‘Actually, you don’t give a fuck about here’. The fact people then voted Brexit; they were just slamming a door, giving a big two-fingered salute. That’s what it was.
“As you can imagine, as an ex-Guardian writer, I have a lot of liberal, left friends. They were saying these people are morons. But they’re not. I understand them. I don’t agree but I understand. If you go to Easington and see the state of it, you can blame it on (Margaret) Thatcher but Thatcher’s nearly as far away from us as the Second World War was when I wrote The Far Corner. Tony Blair was the MP 10-12 miles from Easington. He did nothing.
“Those people don’t go to these places. Football fans do. And what you have at Northern League clubs are working-class people running them. No one interferes, no one tells them what to do. They are left alone by the middle class, people like me, and they do it really well.”
The other big change is that Pearson is 25 years older. He was in his early thirties when writing The Far Corner. Today he is in his late fifties. His partner from Herefordshire has departed, with one of Pearson’s friends, and he moved into rented accommodation with his teenage daughter. His newspaper column went. There were some bleak days.
One was a Saturday. Contemplating break-ups, adolescence, finances and loneliness, Pearson managed to drag himself to “a safe haven”, a Northern League match.
“You meet people at football and you talk football,” he says. “Then you go home thinking how nice they are. I used to wonder about these people with their anoraks and their badly-cut white hair. Where do they come from? How did they get here? Why are they here in their little groups joking about old footballers? And then I knew.
“Your friends are asking how you’re bearing up and do you need to talk? Well, I do, but about Bobby Mimms, I don’t know why. Blokes at football don’t ask you about your wife leaving directly. They tell you a joke. It’s still an act of kindness. That was at Jarrow Roofing. That’s where the guy said: ‘At 2-0 up, we were crooning’ and you hear that and you go: ‘Ah, well, life’s not so bad’.”
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I’ve had a glut of reviews for The Forgotten Fifteen on Amazon lately for some reason. It’s now got 62, 75% of which according to the site are five-star.
Copies also still available of Things Can Only Get Better.Comment
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I've just finished Silence of the Stands myself. Found it a very enjoyable read and would certainly recommend, but just a couple of things jarred a bit for me. Firstly, there was too much metaphor chasing. Sure, some of them were funny and some showed a nice turn of phrase, but it was a continual bombardment which I felt unnecessary. Secondly, it just felt too much like a Harry Pearson book. The author cannot help being a Boro fan, but just the layout and style and match-by-match chapters felt a bit too HP2 for me. However, as danielmak alludes too above, the section on York City, which was in contrast to the rest of the book, was an excellent piece of writing and made me do that rarest of things, to reread an entire chapter just after I'd finished it.Originally posted by danielmak View PostComment
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For anyone without a time machine, 1960s Newcastle United, Gateshead AFC, Sunderland (including star striker Brian Clough), York City and even Gordon Banks' Leicester are all featured in this book:
https://footballbookreviews.com/revi...-gary-richards
To give you a flavour, here are the first two paragraphs of the review:
'The English football pyramid top four divisions is made up of 92 clubs. However, the way that the modern media goes on, you'd think that the 20 Premier League clubs are the only ones that exist. Football history, in true Orwellian 1984 style, has been rewritten so that all before 1992/93 has miraculously disappeared and is never spoken about.
Thankfully up and down the country, thousands still attend games in the Championship, League One and League Two and further down the National League System to watch their teams and ensure that their community, history and stories continue to survive and thrive.'
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Apologies for the shameless plug, but my next book, Match Fit: An Exploration of Mental Health in Football, is now available for pre-order:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...t_bibl_vppi_i1
It examines 13 distinct topics, from the challenges facing injured and former footballers to how ordinary members of the public have been able to use football for the benefit of their mental health. The aim of the book is to normalise conversation around mental health, using football as a vehicle to drive that. The idea for the book came from my own struggles as a teenager, when I was depressed a lot of the time but simply didn’t know what mental health was, and therefore thought what I was going through was normal.
The book is in partnership with mental health & suicide prevention charity Beder. You can find out more about them here: https://beder.org.uk/
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Dark chocolate disgestive with a cup of tea whilst I'm writing, can't go wrong can you?Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View PostComment
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Book looks good, and a timely topic. Good on you.
Blurb: "we discover how being a football fan can benefit your mental health". And I'm trying really hard to avoid the tasteless Spurs jokes here ...
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Is there a single football club that you couldn't say that about?Comment
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Dynamo Berlin were a pretty solid bet back in the dayComment
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It depends how you approach being a fan: I think someone with ADHD or PTSD is going to reinforce their symptoms by going through the cycles that end with inevitable disappointment, but if you are a loner who takes the plunge to go to a game or two, the sense of community must help. I found that to be the case at Barnsley even in relegation seasons (collective coping; enjoying rare wins).Comment
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The chapter on supporters was probably the most interesting one for me to write, as I could see a lot of myself in the research that's out there. There's an academic (and Mansfield Town fan) called Alan Pringle who has written a research paper on the topic and was very generous with his time when I interviewed him.
One of the main themes I picked up on was hope. Going to the game at the weekend can provide you with a feeling of something to look forward to at the end of a tough week, the feeling that things will get better. The unpredictable nature of football means you can put hope in the team you support itself. Achievements like those of my team, Sutton United, over the last few years show that anything is possible! Often if your team does badly it only matters in the very short term - you're always thinking forward, hopeful that next season will be better. Of course community is a massive one, and interviews with Newcastle United Foundation and an AFC Bournemouth fan-led initiative, Talking Cherries, reflect that in the book.Comment
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A New Formation: How Black Footballers Shaped Modern Game. Edited by Calum Jacobs. An enlightening collection of essays which gives fresh insight on even some of the more well hashed stories such as Andy Cole Ian Wright Justin Fashanu Danny Rose & Raheem Sterling. Also looks at the attempts to include Muslim beliefs into game & Hope Powell obstacles against whole of game establishment. And how South London has been the most fertile ground for the development of the modern game.Comment
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