17 years ago today - Chapter 12 of The Quiet Fan

Seventeen years ago today on Monday April 8th, 2002, I went to watch Boston United play Stevenage Borough (as they were known back then) in the fifth tier of English football. The game ended 0-0 and I can not remember a single thing that happened on the actual field of play. Yet I recalled the evening well enough for the game to become the backbone to Chapter 12 of The Quiet Fan, 'Reconciliation'. It was the first game that my long since divorced parents, myself and my sister had been to watch together as a family in a quarter of a century.

Here's a short extract:

That Monday afternoon my dad had come round like a moping teenager to just sort of hang out at his ex-wife’s, and said he had no plans for the evening. And so we thought we should do something together, which wasn’t something that had ever gone well. In the 1970s this meant trips to stately homes (I would always throw up, usually in the car because I was too afraid to admit I was feeling ill), Sunday walks in the Wolds (my sister in a perma-huff, walking either 100 yards ahead or behind), a day in Skegness but with none of the fun (I wasn’t allowed to waste money in the arcades), or weekends with relatives or family friends my parents would complain about all the way home. Whatever the trip, my sister and I always, always wanted to stay at home.

I proposed Boston United v. Stevenage Borough. Boston was a club that had

Football Stories: From fictitious reality to 'real' fiction

I delivered the following paper at TU Dortmund University on July 13, 2018, as part of a two-day conference on the theme of 'Writing Football'

Football Stories: From fictitious reality to 'real' fiction

Nick Hornby once said in an interview words to the effect of, "Who needs football fiction when the game throws up so many of its own stories?" But that's like asking, "Who needs novels and movies when so much happens anyway in real life?" Sometimes a true story can be more effective when removed from the context of actual names and real events. Based on real events, but not enslaved by them. In this paper I want to look at three different ways that football narratives are presented through writing, and to argue that the most dynamic and engaging form of football writing is one that has yet to be properly exploited or appreciated - adult football fiction.

What we get, 1: True Stories morphing into Unreal Fiction. As Hornby remarked, every game throws up degrees of sporting drama. When the purely sporting side of football is converted into fiction, it quickly tends towards a banal recreation of events that are much more exciting in reality - in that sense, his initial quote is fair enough. These narratives focus on football's most obvious stories - goals, trophies, comebacks, mavericks, and so on. They are, however, inherently meaningless. Re-produced for fiction, they become regurgitated cliché. Decades of boys' comics and lame feature films re-tread a variation on the same story line - the sensational last-minute winner in the cup final scored by the (anti-)hero. The team of misfits, deviants and layabouts beaten into shape by an unlikely coach - ultra-hard but ultimately human - overcoming multiple obstacles, also to score a sensational last-minute winner in the cup final.   

This is football's escapist equivalent of romantic literature, full of the good, the evil and the triumph of the best and most deserving, but not necessarily reflecting the way that the majority of people experience the game or what it means to them. The truly exceptional real-life experiences that eventually make football rewarding for the patient, long-suffering fan or player are translated into the expected, trite normality in the realm of juvenile fiction. That is, the last-minute winner you may experience as a

"A Memoir of Sorts": The Quiet Fan - review

My gratitude to @ArloMBloom for the following review of The Quiet Fan, which first appeared late last year on the Soccer America website.

Ian Plenderleith’s The Quiet Fan is an ode to the fans whose hearts always have room for their teams but do not match the popular image in which they’ve been portrayed.

"Football fans may be more interested in the fate of their teams than is perhaps healthy, and they may spend too much time and money on their interest (but then what’s a hobby for?). Some of them may, for a short while, take defeat far more seriously than is rational. These are all parts of being a normal football fan. ... For the most part we are not, as commonly portrayed, obsessives."
Plenderleith skillfully maneuvers a dozen themes – Cursing, Tears, Kissing, Violence, Despair, Hope, Change, Love, Death, Birth, Reconciliation, Success – all linked to soccer games, in this memoir of sorts.

Laced throughout are sometimes delightful, sometimes sad stories from his life in and around soccer. What is most enjoyable is how much Plenderleith speaks to you, the reader. His voice isn’t condescending, he’s not afraid to break the fourth wall, often cracking jokes at his own expense, giving his audience the life lessons soccer may teach.

Plenderleith attaches a distinct human experience to specific games of his