Footie heads will snap up this collection of specially-commissioned essays on fandom as a matter of course. But it should also be read by people whose habitual response to football fever is a) wonder what it's all about; and b) switch it off, because out of the inevitable litany of match results, triumphs and disasters, there emerge some startling truths. The tone is predominantly elegiac: it's as if these writers - boys to a man, naturally - were writing about a game that died, an ideal that no longer exists. And maybe they are. Check out Ed Horton's razor-sharp analysis of the effect of Robert Maxwell on Oxford United; Harry Ritchie's affectionate ribbing of Raith Rovers; and D.J. Taylor's bittersweet awareness of where, exactly, a club such as Norwich City fits into the soccer scheme of things. "Any club which manages . . . to storm the citadels of seven-figure transfer fees and TV revenue is regarded with a sort of fascinated disgust, like a dustman arriving in the Ascot enclosure."
