Shots in the Dark: A Diary of Saturday Dreams and Strange Times, by David Kynaston

Shots in the Dark: A Diary of Saturday Dreams and Strange Times

By David Kynaston Bloomsbury £16.99

Middle-class football fandom is said to date back to Arsenal obsessive Nick Hornby’s 1992 memoir, Fever Pitch – thus the tease that Arsenal fans now eat takeaway sushi at half-time.

David Kynaston’s more than slightly bizarre new book – a diary centred on his 60-year support for Aldershot FC – goes one further in de-haut-en-bas

upmanship. His team is a non-league club with an average weekly attendance of just 1,700.

No one could dispute his credentials. The author of the magisterial three volume Modernity Britain, a muchadmired social history of post-war Britain, was born within sight of the ground. But one does wonder why his agent didn’t plead with him to abandon the project.

Shots in the Dark traces the author’s interior life through the football season of 2016-17 both as a fan of Aldershot Town FC and as a fully paid-up member of the liberal elite, reeling from the Brexit referendum result. Not surprisingly, it is bit of a misery memoir. It’s grim down south, too, it seems.

The idea is, at least in part, to explore themes of loyalty, identity and affiliation at the micro-level while the same great political forces battle it out on the grander stage of national and international politics. For if the name Aldershot (or ‘The Shots’) is the most frequently used in the book, the second is Trump – his rise and eventual victory in the US presidential elections providing a parallel narrative thread.

This is not, after all, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn’s suburban Aldershot – all sundrenched tennis courts and afternoon tea. Rather it is furnished and burnished by sheeting rain and bacon butties in the meanly appointed stands of the Rec, the home of the non-league football club.

Kynaston’s passionate love of The Shots is clearly key to his sense of belonging; a vital ligament connecting this half-german public-school and Oxford graduate with the working-class Britain whose history has been his life’s work. Yet one of the many frustrations of the book is his failure to explore why many intellectuals also have an atavistic need to surrender emotionally to the irrational demands of fandom.

Instead, in a nine-month-long diary, he drags us with him on his endless Saturday trips to far distant away games from Macclesfield to Southport. All of them? Yes, it seems he must, with almost every one of the 40-odd games of the season given its own match report, scorers named and missed chances listed.

At least a third of the book hauls us around the country like bolshie teenagers, desperate to get back to our laptops, muttering, ‘Don’t you get it? We just don’t care.’ The more readable stuff comes in between games as his thoughts meander like lost team buses through the psychology of the white-van suburbs to the hand-wringing of the metropolitan media and back again.

Football, it seems, is Kynaston’s anchor in working-class realities. Moreover, he is honest in acknowledging his own chauvinism, loathing the big-money internationalism of the top Premier League clubs with their foreign managers, owners and players.

‘For all my instinctive fear & dread of nationalism,’ he writes, ‘I am Little Englisher [sic] enough to feel strongly that England football & cricket teams should 100% comprise Englishmen/ women – & that applies to their coaches/ managers also.’

In the very same diary entry, while castigating the remoteness, arrogance and virtue-signalling of the liberalminded classes he also says he would still sign up to their values.

If this all sounds rather heavy-duty – a bit The Rime of the Ancient Remainer – then wait till Donald Trump makes his entry. Yet, between the goalless draws, the chants and the rants, there are more surprising passages too: occasional vicious pen portraits of public figures, retracted a few days later; a love affair with the work of Leonard Cohen; or miscellaneous diversions into everything from Philip Roth to the disposal of dog-poop bags in the Lake District.

Kynaston’s own verdict is that the diary aims to reconcile his despair at identity politics with his own, contradictory, need to support ‘an obscure, small-town football club’. One, he adds, where the great majority of supporters ‘almost certainly’ voted for Brexit. If it fails, he concludes, he has at least learned that ‘tribalism and decency are not necessarily incompatible.’

For Kynaston fans like me, I suggest a Ronaldo-style ‘step over’ might be appropriate – unless, of course, you happen to be a fan of the Shots, too.