There’s a beautiful moment in I Am the Secret Footballer (2012), a Guardian column turned whistle-blower memoir, when the anonymous author is momentarily freed from an enveloping depression caused by his career as a professional sportsman. He’s at Anfield to play against Liverpool in one of the biggest games of the season when he picks up a pristine, unused football before a warm-up drill and, inexplicably, sniffs it. With that inhalation he’s transported from the corruption, pressure, scandalous abuse and monstrous egos of elite sport and for a few seconds becomes a kid uncontainably excited at the prospect of kicking a new ball around his council estate. This Proustian reverie, a rediscovery of the simple pleasure of playing a game with other people, is treasure, because it reminds him why he chooses to do what he does with his time as an adult.
It’s impossible to dissent from the author’s self-assessment that he’s ‘a sad man in a dark place’
By contrast, it’s difficult to understand why the author of The Secret Lecturer is still an academic.
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