Turncoat – How I Stopped Supporting Arsenal and Found a New Team, by Matt Coughlan, published by Pitch Publishing, Price: £14.99
MANY of us will have become disillusioned with the club that we support at some stage.
Whether it is a terrible style of play, shocking results, boardroom shenanigans, ticket pricing – or a million and one other things – it can sometimes seem too much. Most of us plod along, though, and hope that things will one day get better.
Matt Coughlan, however, took a different approach. A long-time Arsenal fan and season-ticket holder, he gradually lost his love for the Gunners. There was the move to a new ground, kick-off times always being shunted around and the fact that the north London club began to tread water year on year after the early Arsene Wenger-inspired glory days.
“I thought I might still go to the odd Arsenal match,” he writes in Turncoat. “In the end, once I had broken the habit, I wasn’t interested in navigating the various membership and ticketing requirements for a midweek ‘category C’ match.”
Coughlan didn’t do it by half measures, selling his old shirts and programmes in the process. It was time for a fresh start and he decided that meant an exploration of Non-League football, which ‘felt more like the authentic experience I was craving’. Deciding to play the field by visiting clubs in the London and Essex area to see if he could find ‘the one’, Coughlan goes on tour to take in the likes of Chelmsford City, Hashtag United, Clapton Community and Saffron Walden Town.
He describes the matches he goes to and the people he meets along the way in an entertaining style. On his journey, he rediscovers a love for the sport, gets into club boardrooms, talks with officials, finds out about community-owned teams, learns about some historic old clubs and watches a mixed bag of football.
Does he eventually find ‘the one’? It wouldn’t be right to give the game away, but it’s fair to say the book may give other fans food for thought.
Rating out of 10: 7
