the worst football book i've ever read

**Quack** · 02/04/2004, 11:15 PM

Is this Amazingly bad. Really bad. Hilariously bad.

[plug] You can hear me expound on its badness on Off the Ball on Newstalk next Tuesday. [/plug]

Bafflingly, the amazon.co.uk and amazon.com reviewers rate it.

This hilarious review by David Stubbs in When Saturday Comes captures the book perfectly (it's been posted in full on onetouchfootball.com by the author)

US V THEM - JOURNEYS TO THE WORLD’S GREATEST FOOTBALL DERBIES
Giles Goodhead
(Penguin)

Billed hopefully as “Football writing’s answer to Bill Bryson”, Giles Goodhead purports to take us on a global tour of football’s most seething troublespots, where local rivalries make for the most intense derby experiences. Seized one day by the notion that he simply had to see as many of these international club clashes as possible before middle age and adult responsibilities overwhelm him, he takes in, among others, Inter v AC Milan, Barcelona v Real Madrid, Fenerbahce vs Galatasaray and, finally, Arsenal vs Spurs. His accounts are embellished by some anecdotal travel writing and reminiscences about his upbringing, as well as conversational exchanges with his buddies and fellow travellers.

It might be considered prejudicial to berate Giles Goodhead merely for being called Giles Goodhead, or smack of inverted class snobbery to jibe at the fact that all of his friends have names such as Nigel and Toby, or indeed that Mr Goodhead went to public school. These should not count against him. Yet you wonder if only the brazenly self-confident swagger and gall that is routinely instilled into Etonians and the like can account for the sheer nerve he had in approaching and persuading Penguin to publish this jaw-achingly self-indulgent and pointless sub-literary exercise, which, despite its globe-trotting scope, takes the reader nowhere other than up the unilluminated dead-end of the writer’s own arse. As an old editor of mine used to say, “This isn’t writing, it’s typing.”

The Bryson comparison is presumably triggered by Goodhead’s penchant for local flavour and atmosphere. This, however, consists principally of little other than accounts of inconsequential taxi journeys, searches for local bars and restaurants, with rudimentary cultural observations such as the startling one (well, it apparently startles the author) that Istanbul is a place where Eastern and Western culture are closely juxtaposed. With Bryson, such trivia is generally worked up into some amusing anecdotal nugget or dry observation of local mores. Here, by comparison, is a typical passage of Goodhead-ese.

“”Right behind us, a white hotel was serving lunch on a comfortable glass conservatory. Sit anywhere, they told us as we shook out our umbrellas. We munched long crunchy breadsticks until our carafe of red arrived and then knocked that back until our spaghetti appeared. Contentment grew in direct proportion to wine consumption.”

And that’s it. No punchline, no reason given for such a running commentary of tedious minutiae. As Steve Martin screamed at John Candy in Trains, Planes And Automobiles when advising him on the art of storytelling, “HAVE A POINT! It makes it SO much more interesting for the listener!”

There’s far too much of this rubbish, far too little on the matches. There’s some competent footballing reportage but any sense of atmosphere or narrative momentum is broken up by Goodhead’s maddening digressions - stultifying and alienatingly aimless conversational exchanges between himself and Toby/Nigel (bickering about REO Speedwagon, etc) or reminiscences about his Billericay childhood, real jumpers-for goalposts, matchsticks-for-eyelids stuff. His insights into the various urban footballing rivalries are trite, minimal or cribbed, as he admits, from a Rough Guide To Football. The fact that he has to ask a cabbie why Celtic-Rangers matches are played at midday raises questions about why he considered himself a competent authority on footballing derbies.

But then, this is the autobiography of a nobody smuggled in under the guise of football journalism. There’s a grotesquely conceited and ill-founded assumption on the author’s part that his life and travels are far more absorbing than his ostensible subject matter. This is the worst, worst legacy of the Hornby/Bryson confessional school of prose. The only confession I’d like to hear from Goodhead is that he has nothing whatsoever of interest to say and should never have inflicted this volume on a memoir-weary public in the first place.