The Perils of Football

For me, 79/80 was a season when football - always hitherto the backbone of life - provided the entire skeleton. For the whole season I did nothing else apart from go to the pub, work (in a garage outside Cambridge, because I could think of nothing better to do), hang out with my girlfriend, whose course lasted a year longer than mine, and wait for Saturdays and Wednesdays. The extraordinary thing was that Arsenal in particular seemed to respond to my need for as much football as possible: they playes seventy games that season, twenty-eight of them cup-ties of one kind or another. Every time I gave an indication of becoming more listless than was good for me, Arsenal obliged by providing another match.

By April 1980 I was sick to death of my job, and my indecision, and myself.

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (Chapter "Filling a Hole", p. 117)