After The Match The Game Begins

Football hooligan books have become ten a penny over the last few years. From the fanciful Brimsons down at Watford to the respected Cass Pennant at West Ham through to the brutally honest Mark Chester writing about Stoke City, everybody has had a go.

In amongst it all there has been a number of academics and sociologists battling for position to explain just why young men all over Britain were contacting each other to batter each other senseless every Saturday without fail.

The City of Dundee is probably unique amongst the terrace culture that developed through the 80's in that although the city had two professional football clubs with a huge rivalry the casual movement that grew in Dundee enveloped young men from both sides of the football divide.

After The Match The Game Begins is an honest account of how Kenny and John saw the development of the casual scene in Dundee and their own involvement in it. Anyone who is aged around 35 will identify with much of what is written, as the casual phenomena in Scotland exploded in the early 80's and if you were a teenager heading for adulthood at that time there is plenty to keep you interested from cover to cover.

From start to finish its a really honest account of how things went for these lads back in the day and as that generation of young bucks have moved into a world of mortgages, kids and CCTV coverage how things have changed.

Of course there will be people out there who criticise what was in effect a culture of violence but our country has had violence in it whatever decade you happen to look at. These boys generally just wanted to fight each other.

It's a book that I enjoyed more than most in this genre because I could identify with most of the characters and know all the areas described in the book.

After The Match The Game Begins is a book about football hooligans and if you are interested in that subject it is worth a read.

If you are not then the best advice I could give would be jog on....



After The Match The Game Begins is published by John Blake and available from most good bookshops. It is available as a hard back priced at £17.99.