Dimensions
132 x 199 x 23mm
Growing up in rural Australia in the 1970s as a young English immigrant was a calculated risk, especially if you were fanatical about the sport unkindly labelled 'wogball'. In Offsider: How a scrawny Pommy kid learnt to love the Socceroos, Patrick Mangan describes his long and perilous journey from the suburbs of London to country Victoria to the MCG, from Big Ben to bulbous Mallee skies and beyond. All with the added stigma of barracking for hapless, relegation-bound Arsenal-the Gunners.
Like Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch set among the gum trees and dust, it's the story of a frail Pommy kid falling in love with the world game, his epic battle to convert the pagans of the outback to the cause, and, sowing the seeds for a future career in sports journalism, the building of a publishing empire-producing Ballarat's most popular soccer magazine ever made by 12 year olds (circulation: six).
Offsider is about a boy coming to terms with growing up in Australia when his heart is 12,000 miles away. It's about how sport defines us, how nationality defines us. And how, against a background of the Socceroos' World Cup campaigns, Australia evolved into a football nation.
