Nick Hornby and his infectious Fever Pitch have a lot to answer for. Never has one book spawned such a raggedy family of pale and scrawny imitators. Hornby's herd of puny literary progeny seem doomed to stalk the earth, boring the shorts off anybody who will sit still long enough.
Every train-spotterish schmuck who ever got his shoes wet standing on a crumbling football terrace has suddenly realised that, yes, he too lived out his life according to the fixtures of his favourite team and yes, he too wants to tell the world about it through the medium of self-indulgent dross.
It has all become as wearying and meaningless as a scoreless friendly in June. Soccer has been appropriated as a symbol of working class chic by celebrities with nothing better to do with their time.
Got a favourite club, mate? Pick up 50 working class credibility club points and appear on TV to talk about it. Been to actual games, mate? Write a book and claim to miss the warmth of the terraces. Jackpot, mate. Aye footie, it's the red in my blood, the blue in my eyes and the air in my lungs.
Onto this steaming compost heap is tossed Eamonn Sweeney's surprising paen to life as a Sligo Rovers fan. The cover blurbing did little to lift this talent scout's heavy heart. On the back there is a quote from a review by Patrick McCabe which gives the "Score so far this season: Sweeney - 100. Every Other Would Be Literary Sports Writer - 0". It takes the briefest scan through the book to find McCabe warmly and incestuously name-checked inside. Bah! Stop fannying aboot lads.
Yet Sweeney overcomes the already hackneyed conventions of the genre and the embarrassment of McCabe's premature celebratory embrace and fights back from a couple of goals down to salvage a draw. He is thus entitled to run around the library with his geansai over his face before making like an airplane and doing a Klinsmann. This is a respectable addition to the post-Hornby cannon.
The boy has his strong points: A charmingly authentic affection for Sligo Rovers (and more understandably Leeds United) as well as the unfussy style which made Waiting For The Healer such a convincing debut back in the latter stages of last season.
From the kick off he announces (in the refreshing attacking style of Gore Vidal's Palimpsest) that this being a memoir, much of it will be lies. Yet the passages where he dwells on Sligo, football and his father have too much of the feel of real emotion in them to be anything but genuine (or the work of a talented novelist selling dummies to saps).
Where football exists as a window to the world of Sweeney's beery father the prose and passion is most convincing. There is something about Sweeney's descriptions of his family keeping in touch with each other through the medium of Rovers results which speaks volumes about the stifling reticence which cripples many Irish relationships and the lonely rituals of the emigrant.
With the soap box stuff he strays inadvertently offside however. Sweeney wanders off into little world view discourses every now and again and disrupts the rhythm of his own play. A more ruthless editor would have made a highlights job out of this and culled the ponderous meditations on drink and GAA and the like. The bones of Sweeney's story should stand alone.
He struggles sometimes (like the rest of us) with finding the original prose to describe the repetitious choreography of soccer action. Yet the passage of pure memoir make even these small faults easy to digest.
Midweek fixture stuff with a stern talking to at half time, but he does enough to make it through to the next round with his eye on more important games to come. (Wisely, too, he eschews the glib extended football metaphors where possible.)
Tom Humphries is an Irish Times journalist