In the summer of 2001, I spent a few weeks in a French campsite during my last family holiday with my parents reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. As part of the Scottish Higher English curriculum we had to complete a Review of Personal Reading (RPR) project on a book of our choice. As the summer holidays approached and I had yet to decide on my choice, I picked up Catch-22, saw World War 2 and humour and determined it would be worth a punt. And so, in between games of golf and reading yesterday’s newspapers, I worked my way through Yossarian’s adventures and found out the real meaning of Catch-22.

Just as I was about to begin work on my RPR my mother brought me a copy of Fever Pitch she’d picked up in a Charity Shop. ‘I’ve seen the film, I protested, so I know what it’s about,’ fully intending not to read. Of all the things I gained from the book, the lesson to never assume a film and a book are one and the same, may have been the most important. Over the summer months, the Kindle version kept popping up in my recommendations and I eventually gave in, spent the $4.99 and took a journey to the youth of Nick Hornby and myself.

Fever Pitch is about the consumption of football. It had consumed Hornby’s life and it consumed mine and I consumed the book voraciously. Even though I had started my RPR on Catch-22, I asked to change. Luckily, my cool English teacher, who knew I was football daft, allowed me to make the change. ‘I think you’ll enjoy that book more’ was his astute prediction.

Fever Pitch was written in 1992 and is Hornby’s autobiography of his Arsenal obsession. It was his breakout work, opening the door for his later success in novels and screenwriting such as High Fidelity, About a Boy and Brooklyn.

It begins (the book and Hornby’s Arsenal obsession) in 1968 with a young Hornby attending an end of season encounter between Arsenal and Stoke. With his parents divorced and his father searching for weekend activities in his time with his children, Hornby’s father takes him to Highbury and he falls ‘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.’

It is the pain and disruption that the bulk of the 250 pages cover. The book is chronological with chapters on select games serving as milestones for a particular aspect of the fan experience. The structure allows him to go off on tangents without losing the reader, it flows well and is easy to consume. I read it in a couple of nights the first time but it was a week this time around. Like an ageing striker I am getting slower with time.

My favourite parts of the book were and are, the observations. I loved Hornby’s thoughts on the perfect score (3-2 win after being 2-0 down at half-time), on how good you have to be to be the worst player on the Arsenal team (Gus Caesar the player in question) and when a crowd is noisiest (behind but playing well). I knew other supporters were at least as passionate about the game as I was but Hornby articulated that and explored it in a depth that I had not experienced until that point. Touching on the small details that combine to create the fan experience.

Over 30 years since it was published, it still remains a unique football book, genre-creating but also defining. Brilliant Orange may be the Gold Standard on explorations of national identity and football but Calcio or Morbo or Futebol, still have lots to offer the reader. Fever Pitch on Liverpool, Fiorentina or Central Coast Mariners would not.

It’s not just about football. The book is an autobiography. As a 30-something male now, I found these parts just as relatable as the fan sections. His awkward childhood is explored, his relationships and his struggles with depression and his challenges in finding his place, the feeling that the window to exploit his talent is closing as he wades through the rejection letters. He is unable to separate this from Arsenal which remains one of the constants in his life and provides him the security he needs amidst uncertainty. Arsenal may be shit but at least they will always be there. On his move to University and away from Arsenal, a time that could have allowed him ‘shed the little boy whose Arsenal fixation had helped him through a tricky patch in his childhood and early teens, and become somebody else completely, a swaggeringly confident and ambitious young man.’ Instead ‘I hung on to my boyhood self for dear life, and I let him guide me through my undergraduate years; and thus football, not for the first or last time, and through no fault of its own, served both as a backbone and as a retardant.’

We’ve all seen friends drift away from the game over time and we’ve seen those who double down, freed by earning their own money and controlling their own time to go home and away, to rent that flat close to the stadium and we are all in many ways, hanging on to our boyhood self.

There’s a feeling in the later part of the book, though not explicitly stated, that Fever Pitch was his last shot at making a go at writing. And so he turned to what he knew best and wrote about what he loved. Clearly given his enduring success it was a wise move. He writes about seeing his and Arsenal’s fortunes as being one and same. It’s appropriate that it is Arsenal that takes him over the hump into mainstream recognition at a time when they rose back to the ascendancy of the English game.

When I first read the book it was less than a decade old and though 1992 seemed a lot further away then than 2013 does to me now. Arsenal and George Graham were still fresh in the memory, Tony Adams was still playing and the Gunners were still at Highbury. So for younger readers it may seem a bit harder to place the teams, the players and even the stadiums but the emotions of fandom do not change. It’s also a nice history of the game of sorts. In a world where ‘modern football’ is deemed as rubbish, Hornby reminds us that it wasn’t necessarily all that great before the Premier League era.

I have read over the years some cynicism towards Fever Pitch, from the type of folks who might consider themselves as a ‘proper football fan’. In part it might be because of Hornby’s Oxbridge middle-class background which he shouldn’t have to account for. Developing an obsession for football is not and should not be dependent on your background and education level. That being said,I did have a nagging feeling during the re-reading of the book that Fever Pitch was not written for the football fan. That the target audience was outsiders to the game, the literati who might enjoy the curiosity of this ‘football obsessive’ and the game as a whole. It’s the same feeling I got from ‘Among the Thugs’ for which I could not make it through a couple of chapters. On the flip side, the book is written at the end of the 80s a dark period of hooliganism and stadium disasters, with football supporters demonised by politicians and media alike. Hornby’s book is in many ways a defense of the football fan, a response to the stereotypes attached to lovers of the game.

I loved Fever Pitch at the time and I still think it’s a tremendous book. At the age of 16 it opened a door into a different type of football reading, away from the turgidity of autobiographies, which had initially inspired but quickly become very repetitive. There are very few (great) books written about watching of the game. Most are focused on the pitch, not on the stands. It’s not easy to imagine having the genius of Johan Cruyff or Brian Clough. We all however have our own memories of walking up the steps and seeing the pitch for the first time, recalling arcane knowledge about our club from the attics of our brain and rejoicing and replaying last-minute winners. We might just not have had our Michael Thomas moment. Yet…