Fever Pitch Quotes
"Football culture is so amorphous, so unwieldy, so big... that it inevitably attracts more than its fair share of fantasists."
"Dialogue in works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion."
"The whole point about death, metaphorically speaking, is that it is almost bound to occur before the major trophies have been awarded."
"There is no North Bank now. The Taylor Report recommended that, post-Hillsborough, football stadia should become all-seater."
"I like to think that I’ve learned that one. But I can still feel it in me, sometimes."
"Men laugh at what they see as the grotesque inadequacy of groupies, but a one-night stand with a star is perfectly understandable."
"It is a ludicrous process, a typically scandalous slice of Football Association idiocy."
"I know that these worries are prompted by the little boy in me, who is allowed to run riot when it comes to football."
"We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control."
"But none of this knowledge could help me. I had been but five minutes away from fulfilling the only fully formed ambition I had ever consciously held since the age of eleven."
"I floated through my finals as if I had been anaesthetised with a benign, idiocy-inducing drug."
"Football fans talk like that: our years, our units of time, run from August to May."
"Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator."
"I preferred to believe that it was the promise of Italy itself, its culture and style, that had lured him away."
"I worshipped him because he was great, and I worshipped him because, in the parlance, if you cut him he would bleed Arsenal."
"The extraordinary thing was that Arsenal in particular seemed to respond to my need for as much football as possible."
"I will watch any football match, any time, any place, in any weather conditions."
"I knew that Arsenal fans might have done the same, and that if Arsenal had been playing in the Heysel that night then I would certainly have been there."
"It was, in effect, a form of self-mutilation."
"It was no use pretending any longer that football was a passing fancy."
"The most intense of all footballing relationships is, of course, between fan and club."
"Prime Ministers, however manic or unjust or wicked, simply do not have the power to do to me what an Arsenal manager can."
"I dream about George quite regularly, perhaps as often as I dream about my other father."
"Football is a context where watching becomes doing."
"The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own."
"I’m mad, remember? That’s what this whole thing is about!"
"Football in London has become a suburban afternoon out."
"Hillsborough was the fourth post-war British football disaster, the third in which large numbers of people were crushed to death."
"Hillsborough was the first which was attributed to something more than bad luck."
"The real point is that the likelihood of dying in the way that people at Ibrox and Hillsborough died will be minimised if the clubs implement Lord Justice Taylor’s recommendations properly."
"Football clubs are not hospitals or schools, with a duty to admit us regardless of our financial wherewithal."
"In the end, the question of why Arsenal behave like this is not a very interesting one."
"I knew when I was eleven that I would never play for Arsenal."
"I don’t want them yet, though. I want to defer the pleasure."
"Against Aston Villa, one week after Wrexham, my whole life flashed before my eyes."