Falling for Football

Adam Bushby

Description

Falling for Football brings together 44 different writers who revisit the teams that made them fall in love with the beautiful game in the first place. From World Cup-winners to works of fiction, from the 1950s to the present day - the teams may be different, but the obsession remains reassuringly the same.

Informations

• Publié par: Ockley Books
• Date de parution: 06 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783013548
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Falling for Football

www.ockleybooks.co.uk
Published by Ockley Books Ltd
First published 2014
All text copyright of the authors.
The moral right of all the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted. All chapters edited by Adam Bushby and Rob MacDonald.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission in writing from the author and publisher Ockley Books.
ISBN 978-1-78301-354-8
Front Cover designed by Michael Atkinson
Layout design by Michael Kinlan
What is a club in any case?
Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it.
It s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes.
It s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.
Sir Bobby Robson
Adam and Rob are the brains behind Magic Spongers, a football blog they created in 2010 and, despite universal concurrence that the age of the blog is dead, they are still running. Under this and other guises including their own names, they have contributed articles to When Saturday Comes, In Bed with Maradona and Run of Play, among others.
You can find the blog at www.magicspongers.blogspot.com and some tweets @magicspongers.
This is their first book as joint editors.
Foreword
Introduction
Cameroon 1990
Greg Theoharis
Barnestoneworth United 1922-23
Daniel Gray
Leicester City 1991
David Bevan
Croatia 1996
Andi Thomas
AC Milan 1990
Musa Okwonga
South Korea 2002
Michael Hudson
Wolverhampton Wanderers 1990
Drew Kearns
Nigeria 1996
Adam Bushby
Heart of Midlothian 1953-54
Ian Guthrie (ghostwritten by Rob MacDonald)
Sheffield Wednesday 1993
Alex Douglas
Argentina 1986
Dan Forman
Weymouth FC 1987-90
Kenny Legg
Italy 1994
Rob MacDonald
Bournemouth 1988
Chris Lines
Australia 2006
Max Grieve
Plymouth Argyle 1993
Lloyd Langman
Canada 1994
Richard Whittall
Arsenal 1987
Roger Domeneghetti
Aston Villa 1998-99
Jamie Cutteridge
Queen of the South 1980-81
Giancarlo Rinaldi
Spain 2002
Ash Hashim
Rossington FC 1997-98
Glen Wilson
USA 1994
Brooks Peck
Liverpool 1988-90
Alex Bingle
The Netherlands 1988
Richard Hall
Middlesbrough 1996-97
Dan Clark
France 1998
Laure James
Juventus 1996
Stefano Gulizia
Olympique de Marseille 1991
James Longhurst
Brazil 1982
Rob Langham
Hangleton Juniors 1989-90
David Hartrick
Tottenham Hotspur 1981
Ian King
Chester City 2008-09
Richard Bellis
Switzerland Schoolboys 1982
John Dobson
Lewes 2008-09
Stuart Fuller
Sheffield United 1988-90
Ian Rands
Swansea City 2000-01
Abigail Davies
Linfield 1988-89
James Young
Bulgaria 1994
Adam Bate
Manchester United 1992-93
Ryan Keaney
Oxford United 1995-96
Sam Macrory
Real Madrid 1990
Elliott Turner
Tooting Mitcham 2008-09
Chris Nee
Yugoslavia 1990
Dominic Bliss
Foreword
This book is a time machine. If you remember your own first giddy discovery of football - the moment when the game transformed itself from a colourful jumble with an inexplicable power to make adults shout at the television into something with shape and intention, something that made sense - then you will recognise these stories. You ve already lived them. You, too, have been a nine-year-old poring over match programmes or almanacs (or, if you re a little younger, the Internet), sorting out the heraldries and histories of clubs you re encountering for the first time. You, too, have gone to a stadium for the slightly overwhelming experience of your first live match and fallen desperately in love with something you saw a player do. You, too, have hung up posters, memorised starting XIs, and - if you re anything like the writers collected here - had your heart stolen by one unforgettable team. It s remarkable, once football starts making sense, how quickly it seems to make more sense than anything else.
The stories in this book are all our stories. It s the details that differ, and the details are what make many of these essays so absorbing. There s Sam Macrory s memory of sitting in the family stand at the old Manor Ground in Oxford with his dad quietly reading his Guardian and his mother leafing through Good Housekeeping . There s James Young s gripping and funny account of watching football in Northern Ireland with a father who belonged to the RUC: Linfield were losing and my father was going to break somebody s legs. Things looked bad. There s Greg Theoharis s reminiscence about falling for Cameroon during Italia 90 on a black-and-white TV at his aunt s house in Cyprus. For my part, I grew up in America and didn t discover the game the rest of the world calls football until I was already an adult - but I vividly remember standing on my toes in Stillwater, Oklahoma, watching Barry Sanders run with a different kind of football, and feeling the same oh-my-God-what-is-this exhilaration that many of these writers describe.
But that s kind of the point, isn t it? Regardless of our particular circumstances, one of the things sport does for many of us is to keep us in touch with the childhood selves that first fell hard for it. That is, as kids, football can seem like a port of entry into adulthood, maybe the first experience we share with our dads without either of us having to feign enjoyment. As adults, it s a way to preserve a sliver of our lives that s wholly devoted to play - because for all that we pride ourselves on our grown-up cynicism toward the transfer market or our world-weariness toward the media, what keeps us bound to the game is the promise of the next beautiful move, the next big win for our club, the next astonishing goal. And when it comes, the sudden crazy thrill is pretty much the same as it was when we were 12 years old.
Is there anything else in life of which you can say that? I can t listen to the music I liked when I was 12, and while I still love the books I read then, reading them today is a totally different experience. But watch an athlete do something mesmerising and 12 is 25 is 50. What I find so delightful about this book is that it shows how much we have in common in the pursuit of this daffy obsession. Football is a strange language in that it s always transporting us back to the moment we first learned to speak it. And as this book shows, what unites the speakers is a shared grammar of emotion - one whose first word is joy.
Brian Phillips
Introduction
It s easy to talk of high water marks. It s arguably more difficult to encapsulate what made a period of time so special. When we decided to stop merely ranting about football in one of London s many watering holes (usually a Sammy Smith s) and commit fingers to keyboards in 2010, little did we know what a fantastic journey we were about to embark upon. Magic Spongers , our blog, was at once our saviour. A release from the drudgery of (paid) work, and suddenly also a medium by which we could interact with a wider audience. That some hardy souls seemed to like what we wrote was a bonus. And being listed as one of The Guardian s Top 100 football blogs on New Year s Eve 2010 was a highlight and a pointer that we were on the right track.
In hindsight, what strikes us is how the period between 2010 and 2012 represented a sub-culture brimming with talent and vibrancy. Our peers, blogs such as Twisted Blood (Andi Thomas), Dispatches from a Football Sofa (Greg Theoharis), Twohundredpercent (Ian King), In Bed With Maradona (Jeff Livingstone, aided by Dave Hartrick, Ryan Keaney and Chris Nee), The Two Unfortunates (Lloyd Langman and Rob Langham), The Seventy-Two (Dave Bevan) and the sadly defunct Run of Play (Brian Phillips, whose foreword we are so grateful for) became our first port of call for the best in football writing and it became easy to get lost in a wonderful tangle of sites that all seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Thankfully, they re all represented here.
Being part of all this was exciting. And that we could hold our own in such esteemed company was humbling. Not only that, but on the odd occasion we made it to award ceremonies or the marvellous Socrates football bloggers meet ups, we found engaging, like-minded souls who cared enough to write for the love of it.
It was these experiences that led us to stumble across an idea, not least because all these talents - and in part, the existence of their websites - were borne of a faint, but growing, disillusionment with modern football and all its gaudy bells and whistles, This, naturally, made the pair of us a little introspective, as while we had found a readership through raving about the visual and print media s lowest common denominator coverage, our enjoyment was increasingly restricted to the lesser reported exploits of lower and non-league football.
Nevertheless, football at the highest level has, and always will, retain the ability to delight. Watching Barcelona annihilate Real Madrid 5-0 in November 2010 was almost like seeing another sport. Watching Bilbao tear Manchester United a new one at Old Trafford in March 2012 was similarly evocative. These were new ways of applying old rules, framed by the fact we d never seen anything like it before.
It was through this mindset, and some rose-tinted glasses, that we began to share stories of how our lifelong affairs with the sport had been forged in the first place, when that sheer open-mouthed excitement was the result of a genuinely compelling experience, not a reaction to one of the big boys getting an unexpected shoeing.
Tales of swapping Panini stickers in the playground and before that, Pro Set football cards, started to bounce to and fro. First live game, first televi