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Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch
ARSENAL v NOTTINGHAM FOREST 5.5.80
“For a year I had lived
with the possibility of Liam Brady's transfer to another club in the same way
that, in the late fifties and early sixties, American teenagers had lived with
the possibility of the impending Apocalypse. I knew it would happen, yet, even
so, I allowed myself to hope; I fretted about it daily, read all the papers scrupulously
for hints that might sign a new contract, studies his onfield realtionship with
the other players at the club carefully in case it revealed signs of bonds too
strong to be broken. I had never felt so intensely about an Arsenal player: for
five years he was the focus of the team, and therefore the centre of a very important
part of myself, and the consciousness of his rumoured desire to leave Arsenal
was always with me, a small shadow on any X-ray of my well-being.
Most
of this fixation was easy to explain. Brady was a midfield player, a passer, and
Arsenal haven't realy had one since he left. It might surprise those who have
a rudimentary grasp of the rules of the game to learn that a First Division football
team can try to play football without a player who can pass the ball, but it no
longer surprises the rest of us: passing went out of fashion just after silk scarves
and just before inflatable bananas. Managers, coaches and therefore players now
favour alternative methods of moving the ball from one part of the field to another,
the chief of which is a sort of wall of muscle strung across the half-way line
in order to deflect the ball in the general direction of the forwards. Most, indeed
all, football fans regret this. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that
we used to like passing, that we felt that on the whole it was a good thing.”
“Liam Brady was one of the best two or three passers of the last twenty
years, and this in itself was why he was revered by every single Arsenal fan,
but for me there was more to it than that. I worshipped him because he was great,
and I worshipped him because, in the parlance, if you cut him he would bleed Arsenal
(like Charlie George he was a product of the youth team); but there was a third
thing, too. He was intelligent. This intelligence manifested itself primarily
in his passing, which was incisive and imaginative and constantly surprising.
But it showed off the pitch too: he was articulate, and drily funny and engaged;
as I progressed throught the academic strata, and more and more people seemed
to make a distinction between football on the one hand and the life of the mind
on the other, Brady seemed to provide a bridge between the two." "The
Nottingham Forest game, a sleepy nil-nil draw on a sleepy, grey, Bank Holiday
Monday, was Brady's last at Highbury: he had decided that his future lay abroad,
in Italy, and he was gone for several years.”
uitgever Penguin Books
isbn: 0140295577
prijs: € 11,50
paperback
aantal pagina´s: 239
eerste druk: 1992 (inmiddels vele herdrukken: Nederlandse
vertaling weer leverbaar)
Engelstalig
levertijd 5-7 werkdagen
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