Fever Pitch
by Nick Hornby

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Book Reviews of Fever Pitch

Book Review: Excellent summation of fans' view of football.
Summary: 5 Stars

Seriously, though, I read this book last summer and my daughter, aged 14, read it after me. We rate it 10, because it sums up everything British football supporters feel about British football. "Fever Pitch" speaks for us so well that most of us who are football supporters feel that we should have written this book ourselves!

Much as he may dislike the description, Nick Hornby is typical of the modern British football supporter, middle-class, analytical, cynical yet obsessive. With the demolition of the terraces has gone football's cloth cap image. In its place are the people who can afford £15 or so per match (£60 for a family of four with no child reductions) to sit in Highbury's all-seater North Bank.

I liked the format, autobiography written as a series of match reports. I identify with Nick Hornby when he relates that he sat petrified in his seat for an hour before kick-off, terrified that Arsenal might lose, and, later on, willing on the final whistle. I love the arrogance in which he writes that it really was not good enough: Arsenal were out of Europe, had not won the FA Cup and were only fourth in the League!

The bits I enjoyed most was the account of how an un-named Everton centre half (we all know who he was!) scored an own goal and how Malcolm MacDonald claimed it for his own! Also, how Cambridge United, when they scored, played "Oh what a lovely bunch of coconuts!" on the tannoy. His accounts of football hooliganism in the 1980s are graphic and should down in the history books.

Although I am with Hornby 100% when he writes about football, he does not convince me so much when he gets on to the male psyche - maybe becaus! e I am a woman. When Hornby is writing about football, he is writing from the gut. On the male psyche, I feel he is digesting what other people have said and written and he does not carry so much conviction.

I am a woman and a football supporter. Maybe there is another book to be written about woman football supporters - we are a growing band.

Summary of Fever Pitch

Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems."

Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger

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