Chuck Culpepper

In which a veteran American sportswriter emigrates to London and becomes a supporter of Portsmouth Football Club, despite it being miles away on the south coast and his knowing next to nothing about the sport. His tongue-in-cheek, self-depreciating style is usually quite effective, and he is quite a wit, as he describes the differences in American and British fan culture and indeed society in general together with a conventional season diary.. The book's readability is very high except for a couple of chapters narrated in some sort of tense or voice which doubtless has a name which I would know if I had been better educated, but in which every sentence begins with "What if" or some other formulation which reads, clunkily, as if he's making up a yarn about something which might happen or have happened. But the book made me laugh as well as raising many a serious point and is well worth a reader's time.… (lisätietoja)

As an English football fan of only three months, I felt that I was the perfect audience for this book. But while I enjoyed some of the wide eyed wonder that Culpepper approached English football with as reminiscent of what I too was experiencing, it couldn't escape the fundamental problem many sports books have, namely that unless you are heavily emotionally invested in a team it becomes somewhat boring to read about one of a team's seasons. I am not a Portsmouth fan, and even if I were, I wouldn't have enough perspective and experience to love this book. I read a similar book a few years ago about one season with the Chicago Cubs and I absolutely loved it (WrigleyWorld, for anyone who might wonder) and I chalk this up to the fact that the Cubs have been an enduring touchstone in my life. The emotional experience of reliving a single season through the book was well worth the sometimes tedium that a season typically is. But I don't have that same connection with an English football team yet, and thus while I devoured the first 150 pages of this book for the newness of the experience, the last 100 pages plodded on somewhat.

But Culpepper is a talented writer, and he acknowledges that he isn't truly a "fan" yet of Pompey, because he hasn't had to endure the requisite amount of suffering. I also thought Mr. Culpepper's reckless abandonment of objectivity and submerging himself into fandom late in life was interesting and charming. As someone who is likewise trying to do this with an English football team (although not Pompey), I found this to be both funny and true. I, of course, don't have the same experience of objectivity as a sports writer as Culpepper does, and so this experience of irrationally defending some team because they are your own is not as foreign to me as it seemingly was to him at points.

Overall, Culpepper accomplishes what his thesis sets out: illustrate the experience of a new fan of English football. And he accomplishes it with some style and aplomb as well. But I still experienced some of the doldrums of a season of English football, and thus I only liked the book. It is possible that were I a longtime fan of Portsmouth, I would have enjoyed re-experiencing their most successful season in fifty years more. But as I am not (nor are, I suspect, the majority of Culpepper's readers), I can only give this book three stars.… (lisätietoja)