Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football

by Grant Farred

Overview

Grant Farred is a lifelong soccer fan.  He has been rooting for one team -- Liverpool (England) Football Club -- since he was a child.  Long Distance Love explains how "football" opened up the world to a young boy growing up disenfranchised in apartheid South Africa.  For Farred, being a soccer fan enabled him to establish connections with events and people throughout history and from around the globe: from the Spanish Civil War to the atrocities of the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s and '80s, and from the experience of racism  under apartheid to the experience of watching his beloved Liverpool team play on English soil.

Farred shows that issues like race, politics, and war are critical to understanding a sport, especially soccer.  And he writes beautifully, with candor and lyricism.  Long Distance Love does for soccer what C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary did for cricket: it provides poetry and politics in equal measure, along with insights on every page.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592133758
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2008
Series:	Sporting
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	284 KB

About the Author

Grant Farred is the author, most recently, of What's My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals. He is a life-long fan of Liverpool Football Club, the greatest and most successful club in the history of English football.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Acknowledgements

Introduction
A Talk, Drinks, and Dinner with God

Chapter 1
Long Distance Love: Growing Up a Liverpool Football Club Fan

Chapter 2
Som més que un club, però menys que una nació.
“More than a Club but Less than a Nation.

Chapter 3
Careless Whispers: The Doubleness of Spanish Love

Chapter 4:
At Home, Out of Place

Chapter 5:
God's Team: The Painful Pleasure of the Miracle on the Bosphorus 

Chapter 6:
The Gerrard Final