Following On: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket

by Emma John

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?

Genres: Nonfiction, Sports, Humor, Biography

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2016

Reviews

[Vishy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got Emma John's cricket memoir 'Following On : A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket' a few years back. I finally got around to reading it.

Emma John and her sister visit their parents during a holiday. During the post lunch family chat, her dad goes to the basement and brings a big package. It contains cricket posters that Emma made when she was a teenager in the '90s. It makes her nostalgic about the '90s and about the English cricket team of that time. That team was regarded as a bunch of losers, because they lost a lot of matches. Emma wonders why she was obsessed with that team and followed their matches passionately. She decides to investigate. She also talks to some of the players from that era. The result is this book.

'Following On' is a beautiful love letter to cricket, to a cricket team, to being a cricket fan. It is also a beautiful book about being a teenager, about growing up, about coming-of-age. I loved Emma John's descriptions of the players and the matches. I also loved the interviews at the present time that she did with some of the players and the contrasts she discovered between how she imagined they would be and how they actually are. I was happy that many of the players I admired were featured – Michael Atherton, Alec Stewart, Nasser Hussain, Jack Russell, Andy Caddick. I was happy that the maverick Phil Tufnell was featured. Even Alan Mullally was there. It was nice to know that John Crawley is now a teacher in school and Jack Russell is now a painter. It made me think of Chris Tavaré, who after his cricketing days were over, went back to teaching biology in high school. There is something charming about that – cricketers going on to do completely unrelated things, after their cricketing career is over. I remember Evan Chatfield became a taxi driver and Colin Croft became a pilot and Mike Brearley became a therapist and Kirmani became a banker. I would have loved to meet Chris Tavaré, the biology teacher, and attend his class 😊

The book also talks about how Emma's mom introduced her to cricket, and how they watched cricket matches together and shared the highs and the lows, and how they continue doing it to this day, going to Lord's or the Oval and watching a match and making a picnic out of it. I loved this part of the book.

Emma's favourite cricketer from that time was Michael Atherton and the first thought that crossed my mind was whether she has covered the two most important things that happened during Atherton's captaincy – his legendary 185 (not out) against Donald and company, and the time he declared the England innings when Graeme Hick was batting on 98. Emma covers them in detail and it was wonderful to read that.

I think Emma John's book is cricket's answer to Nick Hornby's 'Fever Pitch'. It is beautifully written and it wonderfully evokes that particular era. I loved it. This book is also unique because there are not many contemporary books written by women writers on cricket (I know of only Sharda Ugra and Tanya Aldred who write on cricket) and so Emma John is breaking new ground here.

I'll leave you with two of my favourite passages from the book.

"I've always preferred watching my teams bowl to watching them bat. When your team are batting, your instinct is to maintain the status quo, and you don't really want to see anything dramatic happen. At least, I don't. I certainly didn't in the 1990s, when England's middle order carried a hairline fracture that could snap at any second, and I would watch an entire batting session through my fingers, praying desperately for nothing exciting or noteworthy to take place.
When your team are in the field, however, you're willing the action on. Perhaps even more so when things are going badly. Sure, your bowling attack may be getting thrashed around the park right now, but it only takes a single ball to get a batsman out. Nothing can rob you of that tiny moment of hope when the ball leaves the bowler's hand. Every delivery is a miniature grenade of possibility."

"It is fatal for a sportsman to start doubting himself, or his ability to win. By contrast, sports fans have to come to terms with the fact that we are, by and large, losers. Unless we win the lottery of life...we know that at any time the spectre of defeat is likely to cross our paths and ruin our day, our week, our year. We hazard ourselves, again and again, and we aren't even doing it for the exercise. We're not gaining physical benefits, or a social life, or status in the eyes of our peers. We're doing it solely for the hope of a hit of victory, and a vicarious one at that. It's a strange choice we make, to stake our emotions so wholeheartedly upon such meaningless outcomes. Sport is, by its nature, utterly trivial; a team's success or failure doesn't matter anywhere outside of its own universe. I suspect that this is why, paradoxically, we overinvest ourselves. We go all in, like a goldrush victim spying a fleck of something glittery in the ground. When our team win, we're an instant millionaire; when they lose, we're bankrupts. That's the only way I can explain why fans like me keep supporting teams that keep letting us down. We've given so much of ourselves to this fictitious universe that we can't withdraw from it until it has paid us back in good feelings. We become trapped in that gambler's mentality. No matter what trophies our team win, or how far down the league we fall, we can never get out. As long as there's another fixture, as long as there's a revenge match, our sporting narrative goes on."

Have you read Emma John's 'Following On'? What do you think about it?

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last book I read was 900 page slab about football called the “ball is round” packed with insight with no charm. Emma John’s book about following the England cricket teams travails through the 90s as a fanatical teenager has absolute buckets of charm but little insight. In meeting up each of the cricketers from the era are pleasant enough to her but unsurprisingly fail to adequately explain why they were such losers, in part because they weren’t. But also because so little of substance is teased out by the interviewer.

Still if you like cricket and engaging enthusiasts.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5]

I picked this up because I'd read a review by Tom Holland and he'd really enjoyed it and been curious as to whether the book would have the same appeal to someone who, unlike Holland, had no interest in cricket. To which the answer is...sort of...up to a point. It's the story of growing up as a fan of the England cricket team in the 1990s, a time when, at least according to the author (although in the course of the book, she does come to question this), they were a truly awful, underperforming team. And of going back, the best part of a quarter century later, and talking the team's star players, to try to understand why they were so bad, if indeed they were. I certainly found it an easy enough read. But I wonder if it might have been more genuinely interesting if I knew something of the people in question. Names like Michael Atherton, Mark Ramprakash and Phil Tufnell sound dimly familiar, but before reading this I'm not sure I could have really told you anything about them.

And I get the sense that this was a book that assumed its reader either had a working knowledge of cricket, or would be happy to remain baffled by the sport's Brass Eye-esque terminology. At the end, I still had no idea what a leg-spinner was, what it meant to field in a silly-off position, let alone cow corner, or why it is that a sport that involves teams racking up three-figure scores of runs nonetheless so often ends in a draw. Probably if I had wanted to know about that, I should have been reading the Dummies' Guide to Cricket instead. Or as well. I have enough geeky tendencies that I imagine that in another life, I might easily have become a cricket fan, but as it is, my exposure to the sport never got beyond turning up a few times to the youth cricket club up the road from my house, finding I wasn't very good at it, and never going back.

So mostly what I ended up enjoying about this book, as someone not particularly interested in cricket were two things: The accounts of sportsmen who never quite achieved what they had wanted, and the very different ways that they seemed to explain away their failures years later, and
the author's account of what it was like to be a fan, and particularly a teenage fan

Of these, to my mind the most interesting were her account of meeting the oddly named Jack Russell, a man who came across as a genuine eccentric, who had become a professional artist after retiring and the book's closing encounter with John's childhood hero, Mike Atherton, who went some way to undermining the author's whole account of the England cricket team's supposed miserable failures during the 1990s, accusing the author of falling into the trap of "narrative fallacy."

Emma John's own account of the strange experience of being not just an obsessive sports fan, but an obsessive cricket fan at an all-girls school in the 1990s. Which must have been properly niche... The way that, over time, as she went from 14 year old obsessive to someone with a job and a flat and other such accoutrements of, to quote a line from popular song, the downhill slide into the unmagnificent lives of adults... it became gradually less important. At the beginning of the book, she remarks, of stumbling upon an old collection of memorabilia

"No, I felt sorry for myself now, glimpsing a grand passion, and knowing it was lost, that nothing in my life today could elicit anything like it. When was the last time that I cared about anything that deeply?

And then at the end

One thing that meeting my heroes has taught me is that while they might have been different from the people I imagined, my adolescent self was closer to them in spirit than I ever realised. They may have been then years older than me but the way that sport made them think and behave wasn't so very far removed from a teenager

Because it reminded me of my own memory of growing up obsessed, not with wickets, runs and the vagaries of the selectors' choices, but with who would come out on top in the battle between Senna, Prost and Mansell; Whether that year's Tyrrell, Lotus or Brabham would be the car to launch those venerable teams fallen on hard times back to the top of the sport, and why oh why the British Grand Prix had been moved from Brands Hatch to boring, flat Silverstone. Football fans have safety in numbers; there will always be others in the class who share your interest in the transfer deadline, who is in danger of relegation, and the mess that the national team are making of putting together a decent squad. But an interest in a more obscure sport, where you have only the specialist magazines and in John's case, her mum (in mine it was my dad) to get a sense of who was up and who was down, that takes a greater level of commitment.

[Sourojit Das · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant, heart-on-the-sleeve essay about hero-worship. The interviews with the English cricketers bring to life the memories of the 90's (the so-called Golden Age of Cricket) cricket scene, and provide a frank and open insight into the lives of those men who tried and so often failed

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superbly written. The author is incisive, witty, honest, and self deprecating when looking back on the fortunes and misfortunes of the England cricket team in the 90s, and her obsessive following of same. Her interviews with the cricketers of the era who were sufficiently brave to talk to her are genuinely interesting (by no means guaranteed with sportspeople) and appear to be a true reflection of who they are, though I did get the impression some of them may have told her things she could not include in the book.

The book also functions as a memoir of the author's teenage years and early 20s; her openness about the silly things she did and thought is refreshing, and her experiences very relatable (and, I think, very typical of someone of that age). She also takes us with her on her journey to understanding the paradox at the heart of fandom which makes it (on a purely logical basis) absurd. Highly recommended if you're at all into cricket (especially if, like me, you also started getting into it in the 90s), but probably still moving and entertaining if you're not.

[Shatterlings · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be perfectly honest you are probably only going to enjoy this if you were a teenage girl cricket fan in the 90s and I was. I too suffered through these bleak times where the hope killed you, I remember crying in a pub over the cricket result whilst bemused university pals looked on... England had won. Being an England cricket fan in these years was very much a doomed tragic romance and this book captures that so well.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first piece I (partly) read by Emma John was in the Guardian, a colour feature on the Headingley crowd that could have been much more succinct by merely saying "I met some twats who behaved like twats". This book seemed to be highly rated though, and unlike the article, I made it to the end, and was quite impressed.

It is quite a hard book to categorise, being part memoir, part interview profile and part sporting analysis, but the book's two main strengths were its structure and the calibre of interviewees. Only John will know whether she got the interviews she wanted (except one) for her eleven, or whether her first choices declined her invitations, but she had first hand answers from major 90s England cricket players, and didn't just have each interview forming one chapter. Instead, we were introduced to one player each chapter, but each time a new theme was introduced we might hear from a past interviewee as well. As a result the book flowed a lot better, although sometimes John would go beyond the words of the interviewer to try and diagnose the problems in the team or speculate on relationships - I think it would have been fairer to stick to their actual words and her own experiences following the team, especially as each player is still motivated to show themselves in a positive light.

That's not to say this was tabloid journalism, and the book mostly stayed away from that. It was interesting, despite me only knowing the matches or incidents from subsequent reporting or video, although I preferred her writing when it covered cricket rather than her personal life. That said, I liked her personal accounts meeting the players, as it showed how nervous she was meeting her adolescent heroes.

There was also something inherently interesting in it being written by a woman - her mother liked cricket but had nobody to attend with, and John's own solitary visit to the Parks ground at Oxford showed up my prejudice in assuming any young woman attending domestic cricket on her own was a partner or relative of one of the players. Instead it was a fairly innocent fondness for the players and patrotic support, and although she thought of herself as nerdy, one didn't get the impression she pored over stats or wanted to be a scorer one day. Her experience seemed to be a bit like supporting a lower league team, but with games shown live on TV all summer rather than having to attend in person - despite being a well-covered sport, it was only really her and her mother sharing in the joys and sorrows of it.

It felt fairly short, but still covered a fair bit and avoided cliches which meant for a more interesting read. There were few reflections on the sport as a whole, it was much more about her experiences living through the 1990s England team, and from a different perspective than the more typical nerdy male cricket enthusiast. Combined with the structure, this was well worth reading although I'm not that minded to read her other autobiographical books.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully enjoyable book if, like me, you masochistically spent much of the 1990s following England's dismal story as they consistently lost the Ashes, valiantly struggled against the West Indies and were utterly bamboozled by Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan spin. The decade was only relieved by unforgettable 1998 series against South Africa, followed swiftly by a fall to the bottom of the international cricket rankings.

Emma John tells the story through the eyes of a maturing teenager and so it is part confessional biography and part cricketing narrative. What is really enjoyable is the interviews with the cricketers themselves some of whom had slipped from my memory. The question still remains unanswered, were they simply a fairly average bunch of players later to be eclipsed by the England stars of 2005 onwards, or were they made to look ordinary by playing two of the greatest cricketing sides (WI and Aus) in the history of the game? My suspicions tends towards the latter, though the advent of central contracts and better man-management also seems to have had its effect.

[Matt Fallaize · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming and insightful, and pretty relatable for me. Like Emma John, I came of age as a cricket fan in the nineties, when the England team found wins hard to come by, and her evocation of the crushing despair of being a teenage cricket fan (cricket was never a cool thing to be into) who's doomed to follow a fairly hapless team as they lurch from one disaster to another is pitch-perfect. But it does a lot more than that, interviews with many of the protagonists of the period (including this Somerset fan's boyhood hero, Andy Caddick) go a long way towards illuminating that period when the game stood between the determined amateurism of the past and today's hyper-professional (and arguably less fun) sport. The Ramprakash and Atherton ones in particular go a long way to explaining some of the more mystifying failures of the period. John herself is a witty and engaging writer, and the book is as much a chart of her journey into adulthood as it is about cricket.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emma John’s funny and moving memoir of her adolescent obsession with the underperforming England cricket team of the 1990s is a must-read for all cricket fans. Combining her personal story with the trials and travails of the England test team in one of their longest fallow periods, she builds an affecting and thoughtful portrait of her life and those of her cricketing heroes. Seeking out and interviewing the team’s big names - Michael Atherton, Dominic Cork, Jack Russell, Mark Ramprakash - among others - she gets the long view on success and failure and how they both impact on life after the sporting spotlight has faded. John is a naturally funny writer, self-deprecating and with a keen but sympathetic eye for her own foibles and failures as well as those of her heroes.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've wanted to read this for a long time, finally have, and very much liked what I read. I remember this England team only too well, having been brought up on the Gooch-Gower 1980s era and then this lot, seemingly shorn of all its stars and unsurprisingly the results didn't improve. It was the sort of team that the cliche 'God loves a trier' was made for... A lovely effort by the author to relate the cricketers' adventures to her own growing up, the correlation between her life and what was happening at the crease, and she has the skill to make it all work and tie together.

A very nostalgic, self-effacing and funny book. Easy to recommend.

[Jamesm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent book. I like cricket and I grew up watching the 90s England cricket team so this resonated very strongly. Partly because of England's lack of success in the 90s and because of its good results after that decade, I have rarely looked back to that team and so this book felt original as well as interesting and relevant to me. It brings out the kind of emotion that anyone who has committed to following a sports team will have felt.

This book was significantly more emotional than I thought would be possible and in a good way, I thoroughly recommend it and put it as one of my top sports books.

[Andy Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any cricketing aficionado will love this book by Emma John. Written about an England cricket team and an era that was less than glorious, there is much to like about John’s description of the individual players, their trials and tribulations and her revealing catch-up interviews with them after their playing days had ended. John’s hero is Mike Atherton and her account of her interview with him is particularly poignant, given that she wanted to ask him much more than she did but didn’t get round to it. Atherton comes across as a decent bloke, as do most of the players she catches up with and John’s account is definitely worth a read by cricket fans everywhere.

[Alejandro Shirvani · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely nostalgic tour of 1990s English cricket. The author's catch ups with the personalities from the time are really interesting, particularly Hussain, Caddick and Atherton, so there's more to this than just a review of old match reports and scorecards. Now a quarter of a century has passed from this wonderful era it is poignant to think about how much has changed in cricket and how accessible and relatable the England players of the era were, something which the author conveys well.

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, heartfelt, insightful memoir of growing up, dealing with the interplay of anxiety and imagination, and being a diehard fan of a team that lets you down a lot. I have a lot of feelings. I related hard to many of Emma John's feelings.

I ended up rationing myself so I wouldn't finish this too quickly. Also spent part of one Sunday afternoon getting a bit emotional over youtube videos of Mark Ramprakash's triumphant run on Strictly.

[Andrew Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book. I can really empathise with Emma John's irrational obsession with cricket in the 90s, as that's also when I really discovered the game. Like her, I identified far too much with Mike Atherton, Mark Ramprakash and the rest of the underachieving cohort. There's some beautiful self-effacing personal recollections here mixed in with interviews from the leading England players of the era, including a poignant moment where she tells Graham Thorpe how much he meant to so many fans.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't pretend I have ever understood teenage girls but I do understand cricket and cricket-related obsessions. This is a lovely take on the downs and deeper downs of English international cricket in the 1990s before central contracts and the T20 merry go round took over. Warm, nostalgic and reminded me of many fine days spent at Lords watching Caddick, Cork, Crawley, Athens and co. A good read.

[Paul Emmerson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unique and honest memoir. Easy to read and well written.

Whilst reading, John's passion, tales and interviews reignited the cricket flame in me that disappeared after cricket went behind the pay wall.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful memoir about a woeful period of English cricket.

Brought back a lot of memories and at the same time reintroduced the players as more rounded personalities. Fantastic and very funny

[Michael Speight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good memoir. Essential for any cricket follower.

[Mozlenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminded me of how shite watching England cricket used to be during the summer holidays.

[Patrick Tarbox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Emma’s other book I have read, Wayfaring Stranger, she tells such an extremely human story that, even if you don’t like or follow cricket, you would take something valuable from the book.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in one sitting & haven’t enjoyed a book so much in years. I am absolutely of the right vintage to get it - but the comparisons to Fever Pitch are absolutely fair.

[Chris Jordan Downes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emma John had a crush on Michael Atherton in the 1990s. Now after reading about her crush on Michael Atherton in the 1990s I have a crush on Emma John in the 2020s...

[Jarvo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sport's fan memoir has become a well established sporting genre and it is a splendidly democratic one. Rarely do I read books and think I could do that, but I do when I read this type of book. It's about growing up following a team that ultimately lets you down, and feeling that there are parallels with your own existence. It could have been about Football or Rugby, it happens to be about test cricket. What is, I suppose, different in this area is that defeat can seem to happen in slow motion, like one of those slowed down images of a building collapsing. Even if you are losing to Iceland at football its all over in a couple of hours (break included), whereas in 'proper' cricket well you can play very well for that period whilst remaining on the sure and certain road to heavy defeat. Another thing is that those playing the game are more often than not well brought up, pleasant and not spoilt by the trappings of fame (probably because most of them aren't that famous). In this book the author has tracked down 11 of her erstwhile heroes who seem to be - more or less - a very pleasant bunch).
And now for the revelation: I was in The Creaven Arms in Birmingham with a copy of this book on my person when two of the stars of this book (Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton) came in. I'd have asked them to sign it if it hadn't been the Kindle version.

[Martin Rowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming, cheerful, well-written, and surprisingly affecting, FOLLOWING ON tells the unlikely tale of a teenage girl's obsession with the England cricket team of the 1990s—a decade during which they declined to become the worst major team in the world, and during most of which they were captained by the phlegmatic Michael Atherton. John tells parallel stories. She narrates how following the team allowed her to negotiate her teenage years (which, she admits, were not particularly stormy). She also interviews some of the players from that time to learn how dysfunctional or inadequate the team and the management were. The tone, which starts out light and self-deprecating—the curse of many a book about English cricket and minority enthusiasms among the English in general—deepens, as we gain some insight into what it took to be a professional cricketer in a time when English cricket was woefully run and still dominated by notions of amateurism that weren't fit for purpose against much tougher opposition. I'd like to say you don't have to be a cricket fan to appreciate FOLLOWING ON—given that it is part bildungsroman, part Bridget Jones, and part Adrian Mole—but it certainly helps to be well versed in the game.

[Akin]

Oddly enough, this book (ostensibly about Athers) reminded me that Hussein is probably the best captain England have had since the war. At least in my lifetime.

(This takes into account the structural setup that captains have been obliged to work with, obviously.)

I fell out of love with cricket at about the time Twenty 20 pitched up. Baseball does the job just as well, perhaps even better. But there you are. The game changed, I didn’t. My problem, I suppose.

[Michael Holdsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. A fantastic account of what it was like to follow England in the 90s as a teenager/youngster, when all around you thought you were mad. To throw yourself headfirst into following an idolising your team. A feeling that would resonate with any sports fan.

[Alex Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable and easy read for any cricket fan that lived through the 90's.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a lovely book. Whilst I do like cricket (and this made me miss it during lockdown) this book would be equally enjoyable for anyone that doesn't like it or knows nothing about it.