Fever Pitch

Why do people obsess over sport – and do they ever grow out of it? At the tender age of 11, Nick Hornby found himself stuck between his arguing parents who would soon get divorced. Looking to bond with his father, he joins him to watch an Arsenal game in 1969. What he didn’t know then was that this single game would mark the beginning of a lifelong devotion to the club.

Against a backdrop of Arsenal fanaticism, we find out about his struggles in romantic relationships, his father, and his inability to make friends outside of football. Is this really a treatise on football, or is Hornby wrestling with his own failed relationships? I’m leaning towards the former, though there is more of the latter in this than he would probably care to admit. At the root of his obsession is not simply loyalty to a team, nor a colloquial fear of missing out, but a deeper fear – the fear of losing the one place where he feels entirely at home:

What, in the jargon of the therapist, is the fantasy here? What do I imagine would happen to me if I didn’t go to Highbury just for one evening, and missed a game that might have been crucial to the eventual outcome of the Championship race but hardly promised unmissable entertainment? The answer, I think, is this: I am frightened that in the next game, the one after the one I have missed, I won’t understand something that’s going on, a chant or the crowd’s antipathy to one of the players; and so the place I know best in the world, the one spot outside my own home where I feel I belong absolutely and unquestionably, will have become alien to me.

Each chapter is titled with the teams and date of a particular game in Nick’s life. These of course are primarily Arsenal games, although some space is dedicated to Cambridge United (his local team while he was studying) and of course England’s national team. This way of structuring the book really tied nicely with one of the points Hornby made, which is that a football fan tends to look at events in the past not with the calendar year, but in the football season that they happened in. Although some matches carry enormous significance in footballing terms, they receive only brief treatment in the memoir, while seemingly trivial games become the backdrop for pivotal moments in Hornby’s life. Framing his musings on love, loss and identity against a 2–0 midweek defeat away to Aston Villa is not merely humorous, it exemplifies a dry, deeply British form of wit, the sort that makes this book so enjoyable to me.

I did find, fittingly I suppose, given the author’s self-proclaimed obsession with the sport, that some of the football related details in the book were not contextualised enough, and a non-football fan might be tempted to gloss over sections of the book. However, that is hardly enough reason to dismiss this book, and it would probably speak to anyone who has structured their life around a passion or subject of interest. I would add that this is less of a problem in the second half of the book where Hornby takes more time to describe the relationships in his personal life.

You can’t help but feel frustrated at him at times for his inability to see the bigger picture, and although Hornby is clearly aware that his obsession frustrates those around him (and likely us), it’s not clear to me whether he actually understands why the people in his life find it frustrating. I found that deeply entertaining (at one point towards the end of the book, he even suggests he would miss a friend’s wedding if it had been scheduled for the same time as an Arsenal game!)

In the end, Fever Pitch suggests that obsession is less about sport than about belonging; about the fear of becoming untethered from the one place that makes sense. Hornby never quite escapes his obsession, but he understands it well enough to make it both comic and strangely moving. I would recommend this book not just to those with an interest in sports, to those who are struggling to understand the devotee in their life – or perhaps struggling to understand the part of themselves that clings on to something they love.