All Played Out

"This is about the 1990 World Cup and is one man’s story of going as a fan to Italia 90 and it’s another example of the new emotional writing about football. The cover is Gazza crying, which is now rather clichéd, but then it was an icon of the change in attitude towards football and men and how emotional they can be about football – the sheer emotional experience of being there. England played Germany in the semi-final in an epic game and England went out on penalties. There’s no embarrassment about how emotional a man can feel about this and it goes with Nick’s book as part of the sea change in how men and football were being portrayed."

"This book has just been rereleased now, 20 years on, as One Night in Turin and it’s also been turned into a film. Pete Davies really started off English football literature, and when I was going around London publishers in 1991, trying to sell them my first football book, people said to me, ‘Oh yes, we know football books sell, because Pete Davies wrote this very good book called All Played Out .’ Before Davies, ‘football book’ was sort of an oxymoron, and then Davies made it happen. Davies was a little-known novelist, and the then English manager Bobby Robson said, ‘Why don’t you spend the 1990 World Cup, as a sort of writer-in-residence for the England team? And you can live in the hotel, and have complete access to the players, and we’ll shut out the nasty journalists.’ Davies got the players to trust him, and he interviewed them seriously and sensitively, as if they were sentient human beings – which at the time nobody suspected footballers were. He also ventured out into the World Cup, he got out of the hotel, he met hooligans and other fans, and tabloid journalists – there are all these wonderful character portraits in the book. It’s an account of the hysterical football industry at its most hysterical moment during a World Cup. And even 20 years on, you feel some of the tension and the excitement of the World Cup: Will England do it, won’t they? And it’s a book that has lived on and survived. And interestingly, like Nick Hornby, Pete Davies never wrote about football again. This was the book he wanted to write, and then he moved on. It’s gripping and it’s written in a very sort of populist, laddish style, but it works. The characters make it work, and the setting of Italy during the World Cup. It doesn’t matter that that World Cup is now history."