September 12 – Fever Pitch | On This Football Day

September 12 – Fever Pitch

ONCE upon a time football was a working class pursuit, watched by men in flat caps with flasks of bovril and stubby little fags huddled together on the terraces in black and white. These days it is glamorous, expensive, sparkly and in full technicolour. Where once it was seen as a grubby little sport for the great unwashed, now it is cool and watched by everyone from bin men to chief executives.

One man had a big impact on the changed perception of football from a loutish waste of time to a cerebral sport, and it wasn’t Rupert Murdoch. Arsenal fan Nick Hornby published his seminal football book Fever Pitch on this day in 1992 and football literature was changed forever.

The book begins: “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”

The book was a series of essays about Hornby’s life as a Gunners fan and was his first book. It sold more than a million copies in the UK and won the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 1992.

Everyone who read it thought they could have written the book, which was simply a testament to how good it was and how well it encapsulated the realities of being a football fan.

In a 2005 article in the Observer Hornby recounts the perception of the game among his peers: “You have to remember that the public perception of football for most of the Eighties was summed up by a Sunday Times article which claimed that it was ‘a slum sport for slum people’. I had friends – lawyers, teachers – who would look incredulous when I said I was a football fan. It was like saying you followed wrestling.”

Since Fever Pitch was published to critical and mass acclaim there has been an explosion in football literature with hundreds of books on the subject published each year, as football became well and truly main stream – not that Hornby wants to be held responsible for that.

He said: “I wasn’t consciously trying to popularise football, though I did think it deserved better. So I was surprised by the way popular and cultural attitudes to it have changed since – I’m not claiming responsibility for that, by the way. There are still a lot of diehard fans who feel uncomfortable about that. There’s a real sniffiness, an aggression towards anyone who might be termed a Johnny-comelately. That probably makes football unique. After all, no one tells you to fuck off if you start going to the cinema or the theatre. There are still a lot of fans who would prefer their team to be bottom of the league and playing in front of 4,000 than top and playing in front of 40,000. There was a time when I might have been one of them.”

The book spawned a film adapted by Hornby himself which concentrated on the 1989 title deciding match which Arsenal won at Anfield.

Have a look at the climax of the film below, and click here for more on-this-day fun. We’ll have more tomorrow but until then, don’t have nightmares.