ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLARA NICOLL
When Nick Hornby wrote Fever Pitch, he wasn’t just revealing what it meant to be a football fan, but what it meant to be anyone whose sporting passion dominated their lives. Hornby’s love for Arsenal tyrannised his waking existence in a way that was becoming ever “less reasonable and less attractive” in his 30s. His book is an all-time great precisely because it captures a stubborn disinclination to grow up and stop taking the game so seriously.
Sport can mean many different things to us throughout our lives. When I was young, it was less of a conduit to physical activity than a teaching concept, created by adults to introduce me to life’s fundamental unfairness and cruelty. It was brutal enough that I was forced to run around in the freezing cold or withering heat when I would rather have been indoors reading. The fact that I was expected to do so in competition with others, and to suffer the disappointment and humiliation of defeat, provided a multi-pronged lesson in human social systems.