When fandom and depression meet...
Now Crace has written a full book of his own, however. ‘Vertigo, One Football Fan’s Fear of Success’, which chronicles his love of Spurs and battle with depression.
We’re accustomed to fans hymning their sporting obsessions, but mental health issues aren’t as common in sports books, are they?
“I didn’t set out to include it in the book, particularly,” says Crace.
“It was just something that happened along the way, which it does every two or three years.
“It felt dishonest not to include it as part of the story, since I was looking at myself in relation to fandom and putting the spotlight on myself.
“There’s a novelist, Jim Crace, and I bumped into him, as I describe in the book, and he’s one of the most optimistic and jolly people you can meet — but his books are terribly dark.
“I’m a depressive but my books tend to be wry and funny, so it may be that writing captures a side of yourself that you find hard to express.
“So my writing captures my lighter side, maybe, while his darker side comes out in print. And your dark side gets fed regularly when you’re a Spurs fan.”
Fair enough. Crace sees football as a time out from ordinary life for most people.
“There’s that collective denial of the football fan — the sense at the beginning of a season that even though you know they’re probably going to lose, you allow yourself a fantasy of hope.
“And then there’s the sense of losing the last two games, and you’ve Man United coming up, and you think ‘we’re probably going to lose . . . but wouldn’t it be great if we won?’
“Lastly, there’s also the sense that maybe ‘the team fails so I don’t have to’. You watch Barcelona play week in week out, and those inch-perfect passes have got to make you feel inadequate, while with Spurs you can go from breathtaking genius to sheer idiocy in the blink of an eye.’’
Jimmy Greaves was the first Spurs player to impress the young Crace. “Others? Martin Chivers . . . I sort of warmed to Martin Peters, but he’d come from West Ham, then you had Villa and Ardiles . . .”
The list goes on. He admires David Ginola because he was a flair player at a time when Spurs were playing the kind of “depressingly poor football we used to rubbish Arsenal for”.
Mmm. Antipathy towards the neighbours?
“A lot of that enmity is a bit ludicrous,” he says.
“It goes back to the twenties when Arsenal moved from south of the river, Woolwich, to Highbury. Spurs fans have never since let them forget they’re newcomers.
“Then you had for a long time the notion that Spurs played attacking, flowing football, while Arsenal were dour.
“But that’s been hard to sustain for a long time because like him or not, under Wenger, Arsenal were playing some fabulous football until recently, and Spurs were playing the long ball up to Crouch.
“There does seem to be a difference between the fans, though. Arsenal fans tend to be terribly serious about it — they go in to long discussions about 4-4-2 or the diamond, as if they know what they’re talking about, while Spurs fans talk formations and then add, ‘Sandro’s haircut is a wee bit shit, isn’t it?’ “We’re different. We don’t have the professorial, football ‘statto’ approach.”
Different, and all the better for it.
* ‘Vertigo: One Football Fan’s Fear of Success’ by John Crace (Constable Robinson, €17.15).
