Fever Pitch

Throughout Part 2 of Fever Pitch, covering the years 1976-1986, Hornby reinforces the three primary themes of his book: the obsessive nature of fandom, the dark side of football culture, and football fandom and identity. Less than a year after vowing to move on from football in favor of intellectual pursuits, Hornby is back at Highbury for the start of the 1976-77 season. He states of this development, “if I had been correct in assuming previously that my indifference marked the onset of maturity, then that maturity had lasted just ten months, and by the age of nineteen I was already into my second childhood” (83). The obsessive nature of his fandom is clearly what brings Hornby back to Highbury in such a short period, but more specifically it is the fact that the club has hired a new manager and made other key purchases of promising new players.

In the year before he starts college at Cambridge, Hornby is determined to create a new identity for himself, but his football obsession continues to overshadow everything, even at college. He begins regularly attending the games of lower-division Cambridge United, and Hornby even says that he “fell in love all over again” (89-90). Although he is not able to visit Highbury and see Arsenal often while in college, the obsession still exists. He not only needs football, but needs to be a fan. While Cambridge United clearly does not hold the same importance for Hornby as Arsenal, he is soon an obsessive fan for his lower-division club in much the same way. An anecdote Hornby provides in his essay “Just Like a Woman” describes his girlfriend of the time fainting due to the excitement at a key match that would determine United’s promotion. Rather than showing concern, Hornby continues to concentrate on the match. Concerning his obsessive fandom, Hornby observes, “that is what football has done to me. It has turned me into someone who would not help if my girlfriend went into labour at an impossible moment” (98).

Midway through Part 2, Hornby’s tone changes somewhat as he continues to describe how football was the backbone of his life. Now in 1980, after just having received his Cambridge degree, he writes about his obsession as if he has finally realized that it is a problem for him because he cannot get on with his life. The essay “Filling a Hole” describes the depressive state that he was beginning to find himself in, using only football to fill the holes in his life. The essay also describes the ways in which time has a different meaning for football fans and how they tend to measure good years and bad years by the success of their club. Noting that their lives revolve around the football season, from August to May, Hornby writes that “this terrible litany has made me realize just how awful our lives are for these nine months, and that when they are over I want to live every day of the twelve short weeks available to me as if I were a human being” (109).

Hornby also explores the theme of the dark side of football culture in great detail in Part 2 of the book. In his essay “Part of the Game,” he uses the literary device of foreshadowing as he describes a scary incident that occurred in 1980. At a match at Highbury, something goes wrong in terms of crowd control, and a human crush is starting to take shape. Hornby finds himself struggling for air, just as others are, but he is convinced that he is safe. Regarding the incident, he states, “I trusted the system: I knew that I could not be squashed to death, because that never happened at football matches” (121). Another incident reinforcing the theme of football culture’s dark side takes place a little more than a week later, when Hornby takes his 13-year-old brother to a match versus Tottenham, Arsenal’s chief rival. With fights taking place throughout the stadium, Hornby’s brother seems to be captivated by the violence rather than the football.

Once again using the technique of foreshadowing, Hornby begins his essay “On the Pitch” arguing that “it was quite clear that the stuff on the terraces was getting worse and that sooner or later something was going to happen that would change it all, somehow” (133). In this essay, detailing a 1982 Arsenal versus West Ham match in which hundreds of fans were forced on to the pitch because of fighting taking place behind them, Hornby touches on the issue of hooliganism more deeply and descriptively. He mentions Millwall’s F-Troop and West Ham’s Inner City Firm, two of the more notorious hooligan gangs in England, and describes the weapons that have been confiscated by police, and even hooligan paraphernalia such as Doctor Martens and green flying jackets. Hornby also uses the phrase “culture of violence” while lamenting the rampant hooliganism in the early 1980s.

Roughly three years later, one of the awful incidents that Hornby foreshadowed did take place during the 1985 European Cup Finals in Brussels, Belgium. The European Cup, in which champions of the various leagues across Europe face one another, provides an example of how football culture in England had turned dark and violent compared to another European nation where football is also the most popular sport. The match featured Liverpool of England versus Juventus, the Italian league champion. When young Liverpool fans took part in what Hornby calls one of their “ritualistic charges,” meaning that they simply charged at opposing fans in a threatening manner, the Juventus fans crowded against a stadium wall that eventually collapsed, killing 38 people. Hornby argues that “Heysel was an organic part of a culture that many of us, myself included, had contributed towards” (149). Although Hornby says that he never took part in such hooliganism, he considers himself a part of the problem within English football culture because of his obsessive fandom, because it had come to mean more than it should.

The following essay, “Dying on its Feet,” examines some of the fallout from the Heysel disaster. The FA temporarily banned the sale of alcohol at stadiums because it was said that drunkenness played a role in the Liverpool fans actions, and English clubs were banned from European competitions for the next several years. The real fallout, however, came in the form of what Hornby calls “anguished and long overdue self-flagellation” (151). His meaning here is that the nation as a whole was in the process of self-examination as to how and why football culture had turned so ugly. Following the Heysel tragedy, hooliganism even began being referred to as “the English disease.” Hornby closes out Part 2 of the book by discussing the fact that his own depression seemed to be tied to the club’s struggles, and Heysel had clearly exasperated the problem because it shined a light on the ugly side of football culture that he had been so immersed in.