45 pages • 1-hour read
Fever Pitch
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Part 3-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “1986-1992”
Part 3, Pages 157-208 Summary
Following the 1985-86 season, Arsenal fired its manager and replaced him with former player George Graham. Hornby is not overly excited about the hire, but Graham soon has the club at the top of the league standings throughout most of 1986-87. Explaining that managers can alter the whole tone of a fan’s life, Hornby states that “the most intense of all footballing relationships is, of course, between fan and club. But the relationship between fan and manager can be just as powerful” (161). In his essay “A Male Fantasy,” Hornby re-introduces his partner and reveals that their relationship began at some point in the mid-1980s, when she began accompanying him to matches. The title of the essay refers to the fact that his partner actively participated in his fandom and even became an Arsenal fan herself, which he alludes to as something of a fantasy for many men. Hornby, however, begins to wonder after a while “whether this Arsenal sharing really was what I wanted” (164). Supporting the theme of the obsessive nature of his fandom, he admits that he did not like sharing the emotional territory that came with his type of fandom.
Early in Part 3 of the book, in the essay “From NW3 to N17,” Hornby dives deep into the issue of identity and discusses the depression that he had been dealing with in the 1980s. In 1986 he begins seeing a psychiatrist upon the suggestion of a friend. Hornby writes “like most depressions that plague people who have been more fortunate than most, I was ashamed of mine because there appeared to be no convincing cause for it; I just felt as though I had come off the rails somewhere” (169). In his therapy sessions, his fandom of Arsenal is as much a topic as are his relationships and his inability to find a career that he wants, likely meaning that his fandom and lack of personal identity have been a major cause of his depression. After several months of therapy and one exhilarating come-from-behind victory versus Tottenham in a League Cup semi-final replay, Hornby’s depression lifts. This victory seems to have a different impact on him than others, even allowing him to separate from the club in some ways. Hornby notes that although he still feels the same about the club, he now understands “them to have an entirely separate identity whose success and failure has no relationship with my own” (174).
Arsenal won the League Cup the previous spring, and the 1987-88 season got underway with Liverpool visiting Highbury. Hornby notes that this game was the debut for Liverpool’s John Barnes, a Black, Jamaican-born player. Liverpool won the match 2-1, but it was an infamous day for Hornby because of some of the ugliness that he witnessed on the terraces. Countless bananas were hurled onto the pitch, which was obviously a racist gesture aimed at Barnes. Although Barnes was a Liverpool player and Liverpool was the visiting club, the bananas were being thrown by Liverpool’s own fans. In differentiating Arsenal fans from Liverpool fans on this day, Hornby argues that “Arsenal, by and large, have no problems with this kind of filth any more, although they have problems with other kinds, particularly anti-Semitism” (181). Hornby also suggests that part of him agrees with the sentiment that decent people should stop going to games until this sort of thing stops, but he simultaneously admits that he knows that he cannot stop going “because of the strength of my obsession” (183).
Arsenal reached the League Cup Final again in 1988, thanks to a decisive semi-final victory against Everton, which Hornby details in the essay “No Apology Necessary.” Rather than zeroing in on his continued Arsenal obsession, he uses the essay to explain why he loves football in the general sense. The rarity value of goals, as opposed to points in other sports, is one of the aspects that Hornby loves, but it is also the sport’s pace, its lack of formula, the fact that the better teams often do not win, and the overall athleticism required. The most compelling argument, however, for why live football means so much to Hornby is its once-in-a-lifetime feature. Regardless of how entertaining they are, rock concerts, films, and live theater are typically repeated over and over, but football matches only take place once.
In 1988 Hornby begins working for a Far Eastern trading company, primarily as an English teacher but later in various other posts. In March, he is instructed to chaperone a few of his students to Wembley Stadium to see England play Holland in an international match. The evening turns out to be a disaster, which he attributes squarely to the ugly behavior that was common among some fans of England’s national team at the time. Upon arriving, the group finds that their reserved seats have been taken because a large number of fans without tickets have forced their way in. The group also has racist remarks hurled at them and listens to other racist chants hurled at the Dutch players of color. Prior to his description of the night, Hornby states that “every couple of years I forget what a miserable experience it is to go to Wembley to watch England play, and give it another try” (193).
Midway through Part 3, Hornby reflects once again on the book’s overarching theme and his obsessive behavior concerning Arsenal. Referring to the hold that his fandom has on him as tyranny, he states, “as I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive” (205). His reference is to the fact that any and all events have to be scheduled around Arsenal matches, a fact he says his friends and family accept and understand. At the same time, Hornby admits that this is shallow and can hurt those he cares about. He then becomes philosophical about this obsession and wonders if his relationship is more with Highbury than with Arsenal because he has missed road games that he easily could have gone to. Likewise, he wonders if his obsession has shaped his ambition because he admits that he probably could not accept a job that forced him to miss matches at Highbury.
Part 3, Page 209-Afterword Summary
On April 15, 1989, while Hornby was at an Arsenal versus Newcastle match at Highbury, one of the most tragic days in English sports history was unfolding roughly 160 miles away at a Liverpool versus Nottingham Forest match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. Hornby explains that rumors were circulating with fans at Highbury about what had taken place, and by the time they returned to their homes and heard that the final number of dead was 95, everyone knew that nothing would ever be the same again. The disaster at Hillsborough was a human crush, similar to what Hornby had experienced on a non-deadly scale nearly a decade earlier. Likewise, his experience in 1982 of having to jump the wall and flood onto the pitch to avoid what could have been a similar incident predicted what occurred at Hillsborough. Apparently, police failed to open enough gates at Hillsborough and corralled too many fans into a standing-only pen. Unlike Hornby’s 1982 incident, however, the pen at Hillsborough had the perimeter fencing wanted by the FA, which effectively caged in the spectators to be crushed to death.
Concerning how Hillsborough came about, Hornby argues that “by the time football became a forum for gang warfare, and containment rather than safety became a priority (those perimeter fences again), a major tragedy became an inevitability” (210). He refers to the Burnden Park disaster in 1946, in which 33 people died in a human crush due to collapsed crush barriers, and the Ibrox disaster in 1971, in which 66 deaths occurred due to a human pile-up on a stairway. Policing failures in crowd control were squarely to blame in the case of Hillsborough, but Hornby also points out that “ultimately what was responsible was the way we watch football, among crowds that are way too big, in grounds that are far too old” (211). An official inquiry into the disaster was quickly established and was published as the Taylor Report five months later. The Taylor Report recommended that stadiums convert to all-seaters and do away with standing-only terraces altogether. As Hornby explains, at the time his book was written, there was a major backlash from fans over the recommended changes both because “terrace culture” might be diminished and because clubs might be forced to raise ticket prices to make the necessary changes. For the most part, however, Hornby agrees with the recommendations.
Just over a month after the Hillsborough disaster, Arsenal was poised to win the First Division League Championship for the first time since the Double year of 1970-71. The fate for the title would come down to the final match of the season, at Liverpool, which Hornby did not travel to only because he failed to secure a ticket. Hornby describes the match in his essay “The Greatest Moment Ever,” but he first describes what the league title would mean to him after so many years of mediocre seasons. He differentiates fans into believers and non-believers, concerning the club’s chances to win the league each year, and admits that from approximately 1975 to 1989, he was a non-believer. But he became a born-again believer in 1989, when the club remained atop the standings since January. Arsenal won the match 2-0 and thus the league title as well, leading Hornby to declare that he no longer felt that he had no right to celebrate unless he had been to the games, arguing “I’d done the work, years and years and years of it, and I belonged” (223).
In the essay “Seats,” Hornby describes the myriad of ways in which his life has changed now that he is in his thirties. Many of these changes, such as becoming a mortgage holder and registering with an accountant, simply relate to adulthood, but others deal more with maturity: He prefers restaurants to clubs and dislikes unreasonably loud parties nearby, for example. A profound change took place in Hornby’s fandom world at the start of the 1989-90 season when he bought season tickets for the seated section rather than the terraces. Concerning the many lifestyle changes, Hornby states, “these details do not tell the whole story of how I got old, but they tell some of it” (224). The following season, 1990-91, Arsenal won the league title again, and as Hornby explains in the essay “Typical Arsenal,” they did it in true Arsenal form. The team took part in an ugly on-field brawl and had points deducted from their standings, and the captain was imprisoned for months after an infamous drunk-driving arrest, but they lost only one league game all season and amazingly surrendered only 18 goals.
The book’s final essay, “A Sixties Revival,” recounts Arsenal’s 1991-92 season and brings Hornby’s 23 years of fandom full circle. Having won two of the last three league championships, Arsenal was expected to be just as strong. The club played in the European Cup for the first time in 20 years but was knocked out in the second round. Then, in January, Arsenal was knocked out of the FA Cup by Wrexham, a fourth division club. For Hornby, the loss to Wrexham is eerily reminiscent of the 1969 League Cup Final loss to Swindon Town, a third-division club. He describes the season as “The Great Collapse of 1992” and admits that it made him feel comfortable again because it had “a sort of sympathetic magic to it” (239). Hornby’s obsessive football fandom seemed to have returned to the exact same place as it began.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the publication of Fever Pitch, Hornby wrote an afterword in 2012. He makes the argument that more has changed in the game over those 20 years than in the previous 70 or 80 years. In 2011, for example, when Arsenal lost in the League Cup Final to Birmingham City, countless foreign-born players were on the pitch for both sides: Serbs, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Nigerians, and Poles, all of whom had helped to make the game faster than ever before. The stadiums are now mostly safe, but the tickets prices have risen exponentially as well. Perhaps the most drastic change, however, is the widespread consumption of the sport thanks to television. Hornby argues that “it is now easier to watch a Premier League game on TV in New York City or the Canary Islands than it is in London” (242). Hornby also writes concerning the retrospective impact that Fever Pitch may have had on his beloved sport. He alludes to the theory that his book “sold the game to the middle classes, who then became the only people who could afford to watch it” (243), but he tends to believe more that the popular notion that working-class football fans do not read is terribly wrong.
Part 3-Afterword Analysis
In Part 3 of Fever Pitch, Hornby covers the years of 1986-1992 and examines his Arsenal fandom through his own depression and problems facing the game. In the early and mid-1980s, Hornby suffers from depression that he believes is largely brought on by unfulfilling relationships and his inability to find some sort of suitable career. However, the aspect of his life that likely caused the most damage in terms of his depression is the very thing that he cannot live without—football. In his essay “From NW3 to N17,” Hornby states that football has managed to both slow him down and speed him up and that “Arsenal and I got all mixed up together in my head” (166). What he is referring to is not just the highs and lows that come with the obsessive type of fandom that he participates in, but also the loss of personal identity that comes with it. Football fandom as identity is a major theme throughout Fever Pitch, and in Hornby’s case it became so severe that he was convinced his own accomplishments and setbacks were tied directly to those of Arsenal.
Hornby begins seeing a psychiatrist in 1986, and within a few months, he can tell that it is doing him some good. In March of 1987, something takes place during a League Cup semi-final victory that frees up the “log-jam” he has been dealing with. Using the literary techniques of imagery and mood, Hornby describes the thrilling victory that left him with such delirium that “everything went blank for a few moments” (173). Somehow, this occurrence allows him to separate himself from the club’s identity. He argues that on this night, “I stopped being an Arsenal lunatic and relearnt how to be a fan” (174). Although Hornby suggests that his depression seemed to be cured because he had finally realized that his own identity was separate, referring to Arsenal’s win in the League Cup final a month later, he states, “I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me; and I say this fully aware that the club exploits me, disregards my views, and treats me shoddily on occasions” (179). His tone suggests that perhaps his identity is still as Arsenal-centered as ever, but now he understands that the club’s poor performances or good performances do not affect his own success.
Part 3 focuses in part on the various problems that faced the sport of football during the mid- to late 1980s. The dark side of football culture is a major theme of the book, but the issue is much broader than hooliganism, which was a primary focus in Part 2. Hornby uses the literary techniques of tone and imagery once again to describe some of the vile behavior on the terraces that he has witnessed. In the 1987-88 season, a newly acquired Black Liverpool player was taunted by his own fans with bananas being tossed onto the pitch. According to Hornby, “the baiting of black players takes place as a matter of routine inside some football grounds” (182). He suggests that anti-Semitism is the vile behavior that Arsenal fans are most guilty of, admitting that he has heard chants about Hitler gassing Jews. An anecdote concerning a trip to Wembley Stadium to see the England National Team play also shines a light on the behavior rampant at the time and incorporates the elements of xenophobia and nationalism. Hornby theorizes that “bad teams attract an ugly following” (194), meaning that those rabid, unruly fans are typically the most loyal. When a team performs well in the first division, its crowd size increases a great deal, and those fans no longer stand out.
Hooliganism and racism are only two facets of football culture that turned extremely dark in the 1980s; there is also the issue of how football is consumed and the dangerous situations that have come about because of it. In his essay detailing the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, Hornby argues that football is watched “among crowds that are way too big, in grounds that are far too old” (211). When the inquiry about Hillsborough was published as the Taylor Report and made the recommendation that all stadiums should convert to all-seaters and do away with the terraces, there was an outcry among both fans and clubs. While a certain amount of outcry can be expected any time traditions are changed, Hornby seems to be genuinely surprised. He argues that “over the years we have come to confuse football with something else, something more necessary, which is why these cries of outrage are so heartfelt and so indignant” (215). Hornby’s tone concerning the issues of ugly terrace culture and unsafe stadiums is marked not only by its sincerity, but also by its reason.
Early in the book, Hornby pointed out his eagerness to use football as a metaphor for life. The aspect of his narrative in which this becomes most clear is how his fandom changes with his own growth. In the essay “Seats,” Hornby describes the countless ways in which his life changed with adulthood, but he metaphorically uses his move from the terrace to the seated section of Highbury in 1989 as a metaphor for growing up. Similarly, he equates his new seats to a home and the fans sitting near him to neighbors. Near the close of Part 3, Hornby once again touches on the theme of identity by incorporating the technique of personification. In discussing Arsenal’s unbelievably successful but tumultuous 1990-91 season, he likens the club’s personality to his own, even asking “are football fans like the dogs that come to resemble their masters?” (233). Hornby also states that his partner believes his own defiance toward setbacks has been learned from Arsenal. Like the club, Hornby argues:
I am not equipped with a particularly thick skin; my oversensitivity to criticism means that I am more likely to pull up the drawbridge and bitterly bemoan my lot than I am to offer a quick handshake and get on with the game. In true Arsenal style, I can dish it out but I can’t take it (234).
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