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The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North-East Football
A book in which Wilf Mannion rubs shoulders with The Sunderland Skinhead, recollections of Len Shakleton blight the lives of village shoppers, and the appointment of Kevin Keegan as manager of Newcastle is celebrated by a man in a leather stetson, crooning "For The Good Times" to the accompaniment of a midi organ. The Far Corner is a tale of heroism, human frailty, passion, and the perils of eating an egg mayonnaise stottie without staining your trousers.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
February 9, 2011
The funniest book about football ever written - brilliantly combines a footballing history of the North-east of England with sharp observational comedy about the experience of attending a modern-day game.
October 28, 2014
Five stars isn't enough. Would give this 6 if I could. Brilliant.
January 24, 2010
One of my top 5 books of all time! A must for any football fan, this is the funniest book about football ever!
July 4, 2025
This was a re-read for me. I read this book when it first came out in paperback over and over again. It dove-tailed with my going to football games home and away a lot. Plus I think it managed to be informative, interesting, and funny.
There are still bits I remembered - and sometimes use as if they were my own - and re-reading it was almost like brushing up on something I knew by heart.
There's not much else to say. It's a fun read if you like football. It's might seem niche but I think a lot of it is applicable to any and every football fan and team. He makes good points about how odd it is that something as culturally important as football is often invisible in the history of a town or even a country. But he does that without sounding like a pretentious academic.
The regular mentions of Terry Butcher as Sunderland manager though gave me some terrible flashbacks to Butcher's appalling period managing my team, Brentford.
There are still bits I remembered - and sometimes use as if they were my own - and re-reading it was almost like brushing up on something I knew by heart.
There's not much else to say. It's a fun read if you like football. It's might seem niche but I think a lot of it is applicable to any and every football fan and team. He makes good points about how odd it is that something as culturally important as football is often invisible in the history of a town or even a country. But he does that without sounding like a pretentious academic.
The regular mentions of Terry Butcher as Sunderland manager though gave me some terrible flashbacks to Butcher's appalling period managing my team, Brentford.
May 31, 2021
i am unfairly skeptical of books that have a conceit - a year in, a journey to the heart of [insert human activity], in search of [...]. in general i am probably just unfairly skeptical overall as a person but that issue is beyond the scope of goodreads and i'll take it up with a professional. anyway this book was a delight - a blend of short-range travel around the northeast, wry regional history, comedy, and extreme performative englishness but not the bad kinds (laddish, posh, ethnostate advocacy etc). some of the humor was too wokka-wokka and i would have liked more wry history and maybe just one wokka instead of two but i gobbled this up in a handful of sittings. needed more sunderland in it though
June 23, 2025
Fair read for those who want to reminded of north east football life in 1993. (As a Sunderland fan: no thanks). Has it’s moments, but Danny Baker style humour feels as dated as having Don Goodman in your team. Probably best avoided unless you have a particular interest. Hats off to the author for the idea and execution, would’ve gone down a storm on release, but time has taken its toll.
December 28, 2024
Wonderful book, riotously funny at times, inciteful, sad and poignant at others. I implore to read this if you have any interest in football or the north east.
January 25, 2021
A good book about football and the people that love it in the North East of England.
Growing up in the North East the book provided me with a lot of nostalgia and it even Synners (Billingham Synthonia) get a mention.
Growing up in the North East the book provided me with a lot of nostalgia and it even Synners (Billingham Synthonia) get a mention.
August 21, 2022
A mazy dribble indeed - reflections on football in the Northeast in the 90s and life in the Northeast in general with a lot of humour thrown in.
January 10, 2020
Funniest football book ever written
October 9, 2014
Strictly of interest to social historians, The Far Corner is about football (soccer) in North East England in bygone days. It is extremely funny but also rather sad. NE England was a hotbed of developing football talent. Today a player in one of the region's two Premier League teams is more likely to come from Marseilles than Houghton-Le Spring.
Even though the book was written in 1993, it brilliantly illustrates just how far down the sewer football in the UK has sunk since satellite TV and other sources poured money into the game. While unemployed people litter the streets of our cities, footballers being paid £100,000 + per week are lighting their cigars with £20 notes.
Harry Pearson reminds us of what it used to be like. Today, nothing better illustrates the changes more than the nationalities of the Region's top three teams. Sunderland are managed by a Uruguayan (who seems to be a good bloke), Middlesborough by a Spaniard (who may be a good bloke) and, worst of all, Newcastle by somebody from the South of England!
David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil (thebluepencil.co.uk)
Even though the book was written in 1993, it brilliantly illustrates just how far down the sewer football in the UK has sunk since satellite TV and other sources poured money into the game. While unemployed people litter the streets of our cities, footballers being paid £100,000 + per week are lighting their cigars with £20 notes.
Harry Pearson reminds us of what it used to be like. Today, nothing better illustrates the changes more than the nationalities of the Region's top three teams. Sunderland are managed by a Uruguayan (who seems to be a good bloke), Middlesborough by a Spaniard (who may be a good bloke) and, worst of all, Newcastle by somebody from the South of England!
David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil (thebluepencil.co.uk)
November 26, 2021
Came for the football, stayed for the laughs.
Masterfully blends ground hopping, football history whilst giving the reader a flavour of the place. All with a barrel of laughs. Recommended for anyone who enjoys going to matches, not just watching it on TV.
Masterfully blends ground hopping, football history whilst giving the reader a flavour of the place. All with a barrel of laughs. Recommended for anyone who enjoys going to matches, not just watching it on TV.
February 2, 2021
With modern day football at it's lowest ebb of greed and arrogance, this is a reminder what the game is all about.
November 24, 2021
Namechecked for a reason as it takes the whimsical travelogue and puts it into football grounds. All human life is here, and Harry's got a quip for everyone!
January 16, 2021
3.5. There are some football books for non-football audiences (Fever Pitch, immediately, or Home & Away), and there are some football books for football audiences - I feel like this falls in the latter category, and it's not a bad thing. I can't imagine anyone reading 250 pages of very niche Northeastern non-league football who isn't at least a little ruined by the sport.
Over the 1993/94 season, and on the back of a childhood dream to see the house Bobby Charlton grew up in, Harry Pearson goes around the Northeast of England watching games. Games in Proper Football Towns; games in run-down stadiums; games with less spectators than Arsenal have had signings for a while. Every fixture is a set-up for delving into the microcosm of football watching - from the fans to the bus routes to the towns to the histories that they carry.
The first thing that hits you is how many jokes there are - it's like a sitcom jokes-per-minute measurement but jokes-per-page. The guy's an extremely funny writer, and some of his turns of phrase and descriptions are excellent (just opening the book to a random page I pull this:). It also lends the bits where he gets serious more gravitas, which I always appreciate, having done my fair share of Godot in literature.
I found the history very interesting, especially because Pearson was observing the Northeast in both a unique socio-economic time and at a time that the premier league was just beginning to change English football forever. He also doesn't hit you over the head with facts and such but weaves them into the story, which - let's be honest - many Doctor Historians can't actually do.
I do think there were just a tad too many jokes for my liking, though, and more seriously this was the 90s and it is just as dated as Fever Pitch in the casual misogyny, mental illness references, Gervais-y 'everyone should get lampooned' attitudes, which is the main reason I didn't peg it higher than I might have liked.
The best part of the book were those flashes of honesty, a recognition of football that can only come about standing alone on a freezing cold non-league pitch. The wounding of football around the Northeast like a lifeline, 'realism has never had much to do with being a football fan' hitting all the harder when you're talking about a team that will never win anything in five hundred years. 'A mazy run' goes the tagline and it's right - there's a certain maziness to the football Pearson writes his ode to, bygone and half-forgotten, yet powerful not despite, but because of its relegation to memory.
Over the 1993/94 season, and on the back of a childhood dream to see the house Bobby Charlton grew up in, Harry Pearson goes around the Northeast of England watching games. Games in Proper Football Towns; games in run-down stadiums; games with less spectators than Arsenal have had signings for a while. Every fixture is a set-up for delving into the microcosm of football watching - from the fans to the bus routes to the towns to the histories that they carry.
The first thing that hits you is how many jokes there are - it's like a sitcom jokes-per-minute measurement but jokes-per-page. The guy's an extremely funny writer, and some of his turns of phrase and descriptions are excellent (just opening the book to a random page I pull this:). It also lends the bits where he gets serious more gravitas, which I always appreciate, having done my fair share of Godot in literature.
I found the history very interesting, especially because Pearson was observing the Northeast in both a unique socio-economic time and at a time that the premier league was just beginning to change English football forever. He also doesn't hit you over the head with facts and such but weaves them into the story, which - let's be honest - many Doctor Historians can't actually do.
I do think there were just a tad too many jokes for my liking, though, and more seriously this was the 90s and it is just as dated as Fever Pitch in the casual misogyny, mental illness references, Gervais-y 'everyone should get lampooned' attitudes, which is the main reason I didn't peg it higher than I might have liked.
The best part of the book were those flashes of honesty, a recognition of football that can only come about standing alone on a freezing cold non-league pitch. The wounding of football around the Northeast like a lifeline, 'realism has never had much to do with being a football fan' hitting all the harder when you're talking about a team that will never win anything in five hundred years. 'A mazy run' goes the tagline and it's right - there's a certain maziness to the football Pearson writes his ode to, bygone and half-forgotten, yet powerful not despite, but because of its relegation to memory.
January 9, 2022
Although the format is going to a different North-East football match each week, this isn't really about football, but the people and surrounding towns and villages related to each match. I know of Pearson's writing from When Saturday Comes but the style did translate to the longer form.
After living in London for some time, Pearson and his partner moved to the North East, where he grew up, and each weekend he traveled to a different ground to see football matches at all levels, from The Premiership to non-League. Interspersed with the comedic accounts he includes short histories of amateur football in the region and a mixture of genuine and made-up trivia of teams and players, but he has a great turn of phrase: after a trophy was stolen, someone "was quoted asking 'who would do such a thing?' I'd start with a complete twat and work down from there." However, I could only read a few matches at a time, the proportion of comedy to serious writing was weighted too much towards the former for me to take it in larger chunks.
Unlike many similar books, there was little sentimentality for the true fans, and as making fun of slightly strange people is funnier than making observations about patterns of play, Pearson can come across as a bit superior to those around him, with little affinity towards other fans coming across in any of the chapters. I still found it funny, but he seemed to be laughing at the saddos rather than laughing with them, even allowing for artistic license. He did cover the matches as well and clearly understands football, but understandably, more match report-style content would have got repetitive quite quickly, so instead there are callbacks to Lancastrians and tales of fat and threatening Sunderland fans.
Despite being written nearly 30 years ago, it has aged well, with no borderline racism, nor many early nineties musicians or TV stars for topical reference that would be lost on someone now. It also put current fears in perspective, as one town is considered a dormitory lacking the shops and services it used to have. The death of the high street is not a new idea, but now the internet is usurping the bigger retail parks that killed off the smaller community shopping areas a generation ago.
In many ways spreading the book over many sessions made me appreciate the humour more than if I'd rushed through it, because it it definitely one of the funniest books I've read. It didn't have the charm of other books and that was why I can't rate it five stars, but I hope he enjoyed it more than it appeared on the page or that was a lot of effort and travelling for comedic material.
After living in London for some time, Pearson and his partner moved to the North East, where he grew up, and each weekend he traveled to a different ground to see football matches at all levels, from The Premiership to non-League. Interspersed with the comedic accounts he includes short histories of amateur football in the region and a mixture of genuine and made-up trivia of teams and players, but he has a great turn of phrase: after a trophy was stolen, someone "was quoted asking 'who would do such a thing?' I'd start with a complete twat and work down from there." However, I could only read a few matches at a time, the proportion of comedy to serious writing was weighted too much towards the former for me to take it in larger chunks.
Unlike many similar books, there was little sentimentality for the true fans, and as making fun of slightly strange people is funnier than making observations about patterns of play, Pearson can come across as a bit superior to those around him, with little affinity towards other fans coming across in any of the chapters. I still found it funny, but he seemed to be laughing at the saddos rather than laughing with them, even allowing for artistic license. He did cover the matches as well and clearly understands football, but understandably, more match report-style content would have got repetitive quite quickly, so instead there are callbacks to Lancastrians and tales of fat and threatening Sunderland fans.
Despite being written nearly 30 years ago, it has aged well, with no borderline racism, nor many early nineties musicians or TV stars for topical reference that would be lost on someone now. It also put current fears in perspective, as one town is considered a dormitory lacking the shops and services it used to have. The death of the high street is not a new idea, but now the internet is usurping the bigger retail parks that killed off the smaller community shopping areas a generation ago.
In many ways spreading the book over many sessions made me appreciate the humour more than if I'd rushed through it, because it it definitely one of the funniest books I've read. It didn't have the charm of other books and that was why I can't rate it five stars, but I hope he enjoyed it more than it appeared on the page or that was a lot of effort and travelling for comedic material.
August 18, 2024
Pearson goes deep into the North Eastern landscape of English football, armed with a sense of nostalgia, humour and a borderline encyclopedic knowledge of his chosen subject. No team is too insignificant, no location too obscure and no forecast too bad, as he immerses himself in the terrace and pub culture, tied intimately together during the 1993/94 season.
This was as the rules of the Taylor Report were about to kick in, hooliganism was dying out and it was the dawn of global commercialisation of the EPL and the rampant hyper-gentrification of the game, which would bring much talent and riches with it, but possibly at the expense of much more, which couldn’t always be valued in pounds and pence.
It’s always refreshing to see lesser known teams given a platform of sorts, and makes a change from the usual teams and players being covered again, Pearson brings a genuine warmth, passion and conviction to his subject so that at times you find yourself more invested than you bargained for, even if that is only for the duration of the match report. With this being thirty years old, it also serves as a time capsule of sorts, which will hold a particular pull and resonance with those who recall the era and all its pop cultural references.
So this scores high on the novelty factor, and like many football fanatics, he has a seemingly endless list of stats, stories and mythology to draw upon, for instance, did you know that Geordies gained their nickname owing to the type of safety lamp they carried down the mines?...He has a good ear and manages to bring the region alive with all of its colour, character and vicissitudes. Although the humour is very hit and miss, and can be painfully predictable, I did laugh quite a few times throughout this.
March 29, 2023
This is a very enjoyable book, especially if you like football and, in particular, football in NE England. It covers one season 1992/93 and each chapter is about a game Harry Pearson attended that season. Although he goes to a few games of the bigger clubs - Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough- the majority of games are at lower level.
In addition to the games (including colourful descriptions of some of the crowd) Pearson gives a potted history of each club. It’s all done with great humour and love for the game and the area.
In addition to the games (including colourful descriptions of some of the crowd) Pearson gives a potted history of each club. It’s all done with great humour and love for the game and the area.
October 15, 2020
This is the 3rd time I have bought and read this book and it is still as fresh and funny as it ever was. Harry Pearson has delivered a master class in funny football writing.
His fond observations on north eastern life have been a cultural bible for me as a Brightonian living just around the corner from this football hotbed.
If you need a 'pick me up', particularly during these challenging times, then treat yourself to Harry's work - you'll be chuckling in no time.
His fond observations on north eastern life have been a cultural bible for me as a Brightonian living just around the corner from this football hotbed.
If you need a 'pick me up', particularly during these challenging times, then treat yourself to Harry's work - you'll be chuckling in no time.
May 6, 2020
Hilarious; clever study of Northeastern football...deep with northern english humour though, and I am sure I missed some of it. Some of the chapters (each one a different arcane match in the north) got so I skimmed a few pages, but on the whole this was a blast...but won’t turn me into a Boro fan.
July 13, 2022
A perfect balance of northern humour and minor league football in the north east of England in the season 1993/4. Whether or not you like football, or even know anything about it, the on and off-field political and social shenanigans of minor league football laced with a mischievous and hilarious take on the northern character is hugely entertaining. An excellent read.
March 16, 2023
A great and humorous match-by-match read of the 1993-94 season for several different football clubs in the North East. Though the aforementioned humor comes first, there’s also a fair share of historical information I found interesting, including stories/info on the amateur side of football.
Thanks to Kent for this one!
Thanks to Kent for this one!
April 25, 2020
Brilliant
Funny, informative, loving description of a season's worth of games at all levels in the English football pyramid and the cities, towns and villages that the teams represent--happily or otherwise.
Funny, informative, loving description of a season's worth of games at all levels in the English football pyramid and the cities, towns and villages that the teams represent--happily or otherwise.
May 16, 2019
Very enjoyable read with lots of humorous observations and anecdotes.
December 22, 2019
Witty and engaging look at a season in north east football.
April 30, 2020
Great book
A step back to the time when it was a joy to watch a football match!!
Well written and funny you won't be able to put it down!
A step back to the time when it was a joy to watch a football match!!
Well written and funny you won't be able to put it down!
October 10, 2020
the wittiest book on the culture of northeast England I’ve ever read
January 5, 2021
Very funny, and sometimes moving.
abandoned
May 17, 2021started reading but could not relate much. Also did not feel too much interest in knowing about the north east in such detail. I will try The Farther Corner instead.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews