Following On: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket - Hardcover

John, Emma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1472916875 ISBN 13: 9781472916877

Publisher: Wisden, 2016

Synopsis

It's one thing to be 14 years old and a loser. It's one thing to be the class swot, and hopelessly infatuated with someone who doesn't know you exist. But what kind of teenager is besotted with an entire sports team when the players are even bigger losers than she is?

In 1993, while everyone else was learning Oasis lyrics and crushing on Kate Moss or Keanu, Emma John was obsessing over the England cricket team. She spent her free time making posters of the players she adored. She spent her pocket money on Panini stickers of them, and followed their progress with a single-mindedness that bordered on the psychopathic.

The primary object of her affection: Michael Atherton, a boyishly handsome captain who promised to lead his young troops to glory. But what followed was one of the worst sporting streaks of all time a decade of frustration, dismay and comically bungling performances that made the English cricket team a byword for British failure.

Nearly a quarter of a century on, Emma John wants to know why she spent her teenage years defending such a bunch of no-hopers. She seeks out her childhood heroes with two questions: why did they never win? And why on earth did she love them so much?

About this title

Review:

Truly original, clever, funny, poignant and passionate.
-- Clare Balding

Wittily and charmingly combines adolescent excess with grown-up irony and perspective. Sport hasn t seen anything quite like this.
-- Simon Barnes

Emma's memoir somehow manages to be the story of my own youth. It is a touching and funny account of a cricketing era that though recent also feels very long gone.
-- Miles Jupp

A winner funny, warm, perceptive, and wonderfully evocative. Highly recommended.
-- Michael Simkins

Deftly comic, wonderfully true, for anyone who has ever thought that England, chasing 600 in the fourth innings, just might do it.
-- Gideon Haigh

A beautifully constructed and painfully honest memoir of blind loyalty to an unworthy sporting team.
-- Lynne Truss

Wonderful, funny, elegantly turned and strikingly perceptive. Above all it has a warmth you don't often find in cricket writing.
-- Marcus Berkmann

I have read a fair few cricket books but none like this ... Consistently witty and full of wonder.
-- Arthur Smith

A fresh and lively read
-- The Observer

It is in equal measure funny, insightful, perceptive, illuminating and best of all a jolly good cricket read
-- www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk

A witty and thoughtful recollection of growing up as a sports-mad girl in the Nineties
-- School Sport

A funny and touching memoir
--- School Sport

Following On is the wonderful story of John s rather unhealthy teenage obsession with England s finest set of losers ... It is a very funny depiction of why cricket touches you, however bad the team is that you follow
The Cricket Paper

A witty, wry memoir ... the comparisons to Nick Hornby s Fever Pitch are justified
Independent i

A gloriously funny yet poignant memoir
-- The Guardian

A real treat of a book that will gladden the hearts of any cricket lover over 25, and broaden the horizons of anyone under.
-- All Out Cricket

John met and interviewed 11 players of the Nineties for her book ... She recounts their stories with wit, warmth and perceptiveness
--New Statesman

Book Description:

1993 saw the start of the England cricket team's worst ever streak. It was also - inexplicably - the moment Emma John fell utterly in love with them.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wisden
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1472916875
• ISBN 13: 9781472916877
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272