I am the Gloryhunter

Spencer Austin

Description

Shortlisted for the Best New Writer Award at the 2010 British Sports Book Awards, I am the Gloryhunter traces Spencer Austin's incredible odyssey across the country as he sought the ultimate adrenalin junkie high of only supporting winning teams. Randomly picking an English football team to support at the start of the season. Whoever they were, wherever they were, he vowed to go and live there and support the team, becoming a part of the club, its fans and the local area... at least until they lost... then he moved on to follow the team who beat them. Wallop. What a season. Rejoice in his uplifting tales of what it is like to be Britain's ultimate football fan who ends the season on a huge high!

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing (Brighton) Ltd
• Date de parution: 22 juin 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908051943
• Langue: English

Extrait

I am the Gloryhunter
One Man s Quest for the Ultimate Football Season
Spencer Austin
To my most unexpected godchild.
Contents
Introduction
1. Let s Burn Austin Mitchell MP
2. We re Gonna Piss On Your Fish!
3. London s Calling
4. The Councillor and the Crank
5. A Bet with Bowles
6. Logan s Runt
7. Good Morning Britain
8. Free The Gloryhunter 1
9. My Sliding Doors
10. The King of Roseberry Topping
11. Droylsden-gate
12. It s Gone a Bit Wonky on There
13. The Macc Daddy
14. Ee aye ee aye ee aye oh up the Football League I go
15. My eyes have seen the glory
16. Fabio Capello is my lodger
17. Home
Acknowledgements
The Clubs
About The Author
A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of. Ogden Nash
Introduction
I T WAS EARLY 2008.
I left Britain: sick of it. Sick to my eyeballs of its piddling rain, the nose-to-armpit overcrowded trains full of dreary, misery-gutted gits, the 4 for a Pret-a-cardboard sandwich of fat on malted and the sepia streets in which people spit, steal and stab. What a toilet. What a slagheap. I sulked like a ripe old tart, stormed out, flounced off, ran away. I sold up my TV production company, rented my flat out to someone still infested with the rat race, kept six grand for beer money on the Visa card and swanned off around the world with the defeated gait of Reggie Perrin.
At 33 years old, this East End scrotebag had been encouraged by Thatcher throughout the 80s to want , earn and then want again and by 2008, I realised that no matter how high up the career ladder, how much I earned, how many greedy trips back from John Lewis with grubby hands full of gadgets, gluten-free garibaldi biscuits dipped in gold and ironic cufflinks I still wanted more. It s never ending. You never get to that singular point of satisfaction; the task is never complete, life alone doesn t make you happy. I sat back and realised I d spent my entire 12-year working life running after Maggie s golden carrot; chasing the 80s dream.
I blamed England.
I never wanted to come back; the country was dead to me. What a rip-off - Maggie had gone to the dogs and taken my wallet with her. Happiness is not at the end of nine-to-five or in its associated PAYE-dented payslip. It s somewhere else, surely. But where?
And then one day, while gallivanting around the world being the dog on the other side of the door, it smacked me flat on the snout.
When Spurs beat Chelsea that day, I was in Vietnam.
Phu Quoc island, on the map, dangles suspiciously off the southern mainland as though it should belong to Cambodia. I think Cambodia probably think so too. It s a tiny, relatively untouched paradise with white sand beaches and clear waters that combine to form irresistible foregrounds for sunsets you could dip your toasted bread soldiers into while sobbing over its beauty. Where else could you cry over breakfast at sunset? I was lounging around for much of the days, drinking shrill Vietnamese beers and losing a stone a week on paltry tofu side plates, while writing up my first book Chasing the Eighties : a tale of my journey around North America hunting down people and places from 80s movies and TV shows - with the ultimate goal of curing nostalgia. The mission then was to stop myself from gulping the loss of that glossed-over past that had somehow become an unreal idyll, a mental construct that probably never really existed in such glory in the first place.
We found a bar to watch Spurs play Chelsea, and after that nosebleed 90 minutes, I realised that with nostalgia pretty much eliminated, it was time to look after the present, to save my now
The Carling Cup final, Wembley Stadium. For Spurs fans everywhere: glory at last. At last. The ecstasy, the relief, the bloody treacly delicious cloud-nine-o-rama of it. There s nothing quite like the dizzy-headed reality-suspension of utter, unabated glory. Sex? Drugs? Nah. This is what it s all about; this is the real rock and roll. (Slight stipulation: depends on who the sex is with.) Faces everywhere were contorted with that unconditional momentary happiness (which I call the football-gasm ).
Berbatov, penalty. Goal. Woodgate, accidentally brilliant intentional inadvertent rebound off the bonce. Goal. Two-one. Tears and sick up the walls, confused Vietnamese locals watching the riotous screen Robbie Keane, affecting a sort of joyous sob (which, in truth, looked a bit mental), as he waved the cup in front of equally mental-with-joy fans with flags being waved at lactic acid pace. Even that death-faced Bella Lugosi Junior, Dimitar Berbatov, cracked his wretched boat open for the occasion.
All was now .
Everything was that moment.
Nothing else existed; past or present. Tick-tock stopped, froze; time was scrapped and the rest of the day hung in the suspended animation of Tottenham s cup glory. Of course, tomorrow was another day; the miserly clock started chiselling away at us once again. The onset of hangover and thoughts of back to work and the next match or maybe even fleeting fantasies about next year s cup ensued. But if only you could stop the clock from firing up again; keep that moment alive, maintain that feeling of invincible glory and live it as a reality. If only it could never end.
And that got me thinking.
After three months on the road (in backpacker speak, that s around four pant washes), having crossed from London to Ho Chi Minh City by train through Belgium, Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Mongolia and China, I started to realise that having seen all those different cultures and their traditional idiosyncrasies, wonders and wind-ups we re all, after all, just human. We all have the same-shaped brains. We all love, hate, get angry, get sad and everyone, especially myself, has the propensity to annoy me. Maybe, after all, I just have a problem in general with the human brain and its universal insanities, and not necessarily just the English-shaped ones. In every culture, in every country, there s the rough and the smooth, the good and bad, the Spurs and the Arsenal. I realised that I d spent all this time giving other countries and cultures a go, a chance to woo me, when miles and miles away is my home , England, and that just maybe I hadn t really given it a fair chance.
Before, I d got so wrapped up in my own ten-mile radius, completely strangled by my Thatcher-induced greed and its relentless quest for more and bigger, that I d lost sight of what might actually be Great about Britain. Maybe it was the way I was living my life, not necessarily where I was living it. And then watching that Cup final win on the telly, with those faces in that crowd and those flags and the noise and the shivers of awe running down my spine, I felt a pang of wanting to be there , that maybe it s where I belong, after all.
But I couldn t go back and pick up where I left off. Just couldn t . We needed counselling, me and England. We needed some sort of trial period, to test whether we really were compatible or not. Come on England, let s give it another go , I thought. You can be a nasty bastard, but deep down I think that perhaps I love you .
So, I had a desire to freeze that feeling of untainted glory, and an urge to reconcile my differences with England, which tangled together at once.
Hmmmm. How could I get both?
Could Spurs really guarantee me more glory? I ve been conditioned by the recent past to think probably not: Juande Ramos, Christian Gross, Jacques Santini I ve been hurt before, I m like a spurned lover, like a smacked Pavlov s dog, like a Spurs fan who s seen it come and go so many times before. How could I definitely get more of this glory drug? I ll always love Spurs, I will. Can t help it - they re in my blood and part of my spit. I m up to my earholes in Perryman and Mabbutt, even Ramon Vega and Steffen Freund for crissakes; they re my family. I was there to see Gazza mug off Seaman from a hundred yards, Ossie with his knees all trembly and Hoddle perform extraterrestrial cross-field passes. I ve always been there for them.
But no fan wins every single match they see. I needed to form some sort of cunning plan that enabled me to court England, travel through its veins and emerge a footballing winner every week as well. Just imagine it.
I sat for a while, stroking my beard/chin fluff and came up with this way to both freeze myself in glory and court my estranged country again
I am the Gloryhunter
At the beginning of the football season, I pick a football team randomly out of a hat (probably a Stetson). Could be any one of the 92: Aldershot, Sheffield Wednesday, Accrington absolutely anyone, anywhere.
I go and live in that place, breathe it, suck it in and chew it up to see how it tastes. I will attach myself to the team, its fans, the club itself and the community; whatever purchase I can get on the place will sculpt my experience of it. From the board of directors, to the players, to the pie seller, to the man who writes the fanzine, to the village idiot. From the pub landlord, to the supporters club, to the local newspapers - I m all over it; being infected by the passion of the club s true fans - those who ve grown up with the club and care for it like a sibling - immersing myself in it and sharing their glory (while it lasts).
I follow that team until they lose. It s harsh, I know, but life is about winners and losers and after all, I m the brave, brave Gloryhunter. As soon as they lose - as soon as the final whistle goes
I shamelessly become a supporter of the team who beat them. And so on, for a whole season. Oh what a victory, we were great .
Don t get me wrong, this wasn t designed to condone the wretched masses of real gloryhunters; the people you see wearing Man United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal shirts in places that really shouldn t have anything to do with those clubs. To the contrary, I intended this as a tongue-in-cheek poke at those who switch their allegiance according to who