Any Chance of a Game?: A Season at the Ugly End of Park Football

by Barney Ronay (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.25

  'I played at primary and secondary school: in corridors, on the playing fields, at the bus stop on the way home; at university (three times a week); and then after that in pub teams, indoor leagues, park pitch free-for-alls, on beaches and lawns, in airport departure lounges and motorway service stations. From schoolboy promise to the beginnings of athletic decay, football - the basic pleasure of kicking a ball, the attachments of teams, friendships, and moments of pointless but irreducible triumph - just refuses to go away.' Any Chance of a Game? is the story of a season playing for a Sunday league football team and a personal journey to discover why Barney, and men like him everywhere, need to play football and just what they take from it and its attendant culture. Each chapter follows a successive key match during the season and then uses it to go on a thematic mazy dribble - childhood, friendships, memory, violence, love, women, winning, class, nationality and being a man. This is an amusing tale that will ring true with anyone who's ever kicked a ball in muddied anger. It's about embrocation, showering together, half-time oranges, half-time punch-ups, existential angst and wanting to run forever on wet grass.

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $4.14

  Fast approaching 30, Barney Ronay is a Sunday League left back with some tough choices to make. Is staying in with his girlfriend and Gardeners' World on a Friday night doing much for his match fitness? Would he be better off back with his best mate Dan in the bachelor pad of pizza boxes, lager and Playstation into the early hours? And at their age can they still afford to spend weekends in their desperate struggle to keep Bolingbroke Athletic afloat? Shouldn't they be growing up, getting married, spending their Sundays at Homebase? This is the hilarious story of a team in early mid-life crisis, hiding from responsibility in the strange masochism at the ugly end of the beautiful game - the smell of Deep Heat, naked fat men, hangovers and the eternal belief that next week you might just rediscover your first touch.