Catching up with Sammy

John Lanchester

  • Among the Thugs by Bill Buford
    Secker, 317 pp, £14.99, October 1991, ISBN 0 436 07256 4
  • A Strange Kind of Glory by Eamon Dunphy
    Heinemann, 396 pp, £14.99, September 1991, ISBN 0 434 21616 X

A scene from provincial life: one Saturday about twelve months ago I was sitting in the press box of a football ground in the Midlands. The game had just finished (the home side lost) and I and my fellow reptiles were scribbling away at our match reports – written as such things usually are, to deadlines of a hallucinogenic proximity – when a commotion developed. A crowd of people was barging into the press box from an adjacent part of the stand. There were about fifty of them; they were angry and drunk and they were shouting a lot.

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[*] The riot in Turin is anthologised by Ian Hamilton in the forthcoming, obligatory-for-fans Faber Book of Soccer (333 pp., £14.99, February 1992, 0571 14402 0). A mix of old faves and new raves: Orwell, Keller, Ayer, Miller, Pinter, Dunphy, Amis, Kelman Possible idea for PhD in the fact that the only two foreigners in the book – Nabokov and Camus – were both goalkeepers, despite not being very tall.