Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

Everything Fever Pitch wasn't to me.

The 2012-13 English football season has recently wrapped up. This is a brief musing on the season before that. It was an important season to me in many ways; I'd been nominally a West Ham supporter for a few years prior, but this was the first year I really made an effort, watching any matches I could – not many, for reasons I'll get to in a moment – reading soccer news, discussing it seriously with other fans, and so on. Ironically, my increased interest in the English game was spurred by my decision to start seriously following Major League Soccer (MLS), the current top flight of American soccer. I pay attention to a couple others as well, including the Scottish leagues.

So the 2011-12 season is, unlike the 1991 Fever Pitch, not ancient history to me. It's also the year after my West Ham were relegated to the Championship, the level of the English system below the Premiership and also the level where people not invested in a team there tend to stop paying attention. Sam Allardyce brought my side back to the Premiership in a playoff final, having played quite well relative to the standards of the league but not well enough to qualify for automatic promotion after stellar seasons from Reading (who are back down again after this year) and Southampton (who are still up). I attended a viewing of the match at one of my city's downtown soccer bars, at 10am, with about four other Hammers fans and my friend and former roommate, for whom this was the introduction to the game. As you can imagine, I paid quite a lot of attention to soccer that year. And even when your side isn't in the Premier League, it's a big deal and you don't not follow it if you're invested in the English game at all.

Pray, while certainly written through the eyes of an Arsenal supporter, doesn't have the self-pity of Hornby's earlier book, and captures a lot of what, to me, was really on everyone's mind last season. Fabrice Muamba, the increasingly powerful effect of wealthy owners, and more. Fever Pitch was a history lesson that overstayed its welcome; at a slender 41 pages (and correspondingly lower price, don't worry), Pray is a great, quick romp through recent memories. If you're a fan of English football, this is definitely worth your time. If you aren't, probably there's less here for you than in Fever Pitch, since that was a better look at what it means to be obsessed. For my part, I'd pay my $3 for a Nick Hornby writeup of every season, going forward.

I could have done without his dig at American sports fans' love of playoffs, but I have to concede that many of my countrymen do feel exactly that way. But please, a bit less broad a brush next time, Nick.