Fever Pitch was the book that finally brought football home. As it arrives on the
big screen, asks if the movie can capture the real spirit of the game.

You know, I envy Nick Hornby, I really envy him..." The speaker pauses reflectively for a moment, and sips his Guinness. He is sitting in The Gunners pub, a stone's throw from Highbury stadium and, as its name suggests, a shrine to Arsenal Football Club. Every inch of wall-space adorned with mementoes of the team's triumphs: pennants, framed shirts, photos of heroes past and present. The man with the Guinness could be speaking for most of the clientele, none of whom would say no to Hornby's money and celebrity, earned as a consequence of their shared obsession. However Nick Hornby, for all his talent and charm, was not responsible for "Darcymania" among respectable, middle-class, British women, and has never been voted Britain's Sexiest Man; whereas the bloke in the pub with the half of Guinness is Mr Darcy himself, Colin Firth. Firth's latest role is as a nondescript schoolteacher with a chronic Arsenal obsession. The screenplay is written by Nick Hornby from his best-selling Fever Pitch, the publishing phenomenon which has sold over 300,000 copies, helped to restore the tattered reputation of post-Hillsborough football and inspired a new genre of male confessional writing. 

Before working on Fever Pitch , Firth had never been to a football match; now he is a regular at Highbury. So why the conversion? And why does he envy Nick Hornby? "I envy his passion," Firth explains. "It must be great to have something to identify with in that way, to feel obsessive about. I feel very rootless, from my upbringing out in the sticks." This of course, is the explanation Hornby himself gives for his enduring obsession with football: as a boy growing up in the Home Counties, he craved the ,,authenticity" of north London. Thousands of readers have subsequently identified with his story. Fever Pitch director David Evans, who read the book before publication, recalls how it "gave me the feeling - more strongly than anything else I'd ever read that it was written by somebody like me and about somebody like me. Now I know that this feeling of intimacy is a common reaction." 

Fever Pitch struck a chord with large numbers of football fans who identified with its sentiments about the game itself, but it also had a deeper resonance, which contributed to its extraordinary word~of-mouth reputation. For a start, it was articulate and sensitive, two qualities not usually associated with sports publishing. More importantly, unlike those who had written elegantly and emotively about the "beautiful game", Hornby did not merely talk about 22 men kicking a ball about. He chronicled his own life, as viewed through the prism of football; as lived through the triumphs and disasters of the Arsenal team and, of course, its supporters - the one true constant. 

One of the by-products of Fever Pitch was the rehabilitation of football as a respectable pastime. At the time of its publication, a series of developments had already brought about fundamental changes in the football industry - most notably the Hillsborough disaster, but also the "fanzine movement", supporters associations, academic bodies like the Sir Norman Chester Football Research Centre, as well as an increase in public interest stimulated by England's performance in ItaIia 90. Fever Pitch seemed to crystallise this change of atmosphere, and provide a bridge into the game for a new middle-class audience. David Baddiel spoke a few years ago of "no longer feeling ashamed of being a football fan". In 1997, you are
expected to feel slightly ashamed if you are not a football fan. You don't introduce yourself by saying what you do, but who you support. Every office has its fantasy league or five-a-side team. The attraction that the rootless Hornby felt for the game has become generalised: a yearning for social cohesion has become focused on the spurious community of football supporters. 

After the Heysel disaster in 1985, The Sunday Times described football as "a slum sport watched by slum people in slum stadiums". Today, according to Umbro Europe's chief executive, football is no longer a "C2DE socioeconomic once-a-week, excuse for a fight". The Stretford End at Old Trafford was once an intimidating place; a crowd could suck the ball in the net, they used to say. Today, the Umbro Stand (as it is now called) would have trouble blowing up a paper bag. 

The transformation of English football post-Fever Pitch is an unlikely one. Money has poured into the game from television, sponsors and advertisers, all after lucrative ABC1 viewers. Even the FA now feels obliged to woo female spectators and supported the official multicultural, politically correct, England magazine. Euro 96 was an orgy of squeaky clean patriotism with "Three Lions" becoming "the new national anthem" and, worst of all, the rugby song "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" crossing codes. The film of Fever Pitch reflects the changes that the game has undergone. It has been rewritten as a "romantic comedy" and culminates with Paul, the central Hornby/Firth character realising that football isn't the only thing in life, while his snobbish girlfriend (who initially thinks the innocuous Paul is a "monomaniacal yob") gets caught up in the drama of Arsenal's 1989 last gasp championship victory, and joins the revellers on the streets of Islington. In the process, the vivid internal monologue of Hornby's book is lost, along with much of its passion. This too mirrors the way stricter codes of conduct on and off the pitch have smoothed-out most of the game's rough edges. Hornby himself anticipated this in the book, when he pointed out that: "Part of the pleasure to be had in large football stadia is a mixture of the vicarious and the parasitical, because unless one stands on the North Bank, or the Kop, or the Stretford End, then one is relying on others to provide the atmosphere".