Customer Reviews

Bloody Confused!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Being a Brit who now resides in the U.S. I had a "have to have it" moment when I saw this book. I was not disappointed. This is a great fun read that shows the difference between how sports are perceived here in the U.S. as compared to football (soccer)in the U.K.
Wonderful anecdotes about real people enjoying the national passtime. Really took me back home.

Although I must agree that almost all of the many negative comments made by several other reviewers are justified in their way (in particular, the central shtick of the relatively "purity" the English soccer experience does wear a bit thin with repetition as the story goes on), I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed nearly every page of this book and also learned a lot about its subject.
I had never heard of the author, had only an extremely superficial familiarity with the top English league in its current incarnation (the Premiership), and still had somewhat of an outdated view of the English soccer world heavily colored by the well-publicized violence of the 80s. For the role I think it is intended to play (an introduction for Americans to how being an in-person, stadium-going, road-tripping fan of this sport/league is so different from the experience of many typical fans of baseball, basketball, and American football), it succeeds admirably. And I think the writing is quite skillful. OK, it's not quite Peter Gammons or Roger Angell (Mightn't it have been amazing if one of them had pursued this project?), but to me it's a real "find."
Yes, the notion that you can CHOOSE your wonderfully irrational attachment to a team is hard to swallow, but somehow Culpepper seems so open and honest and fairly self-deprecating about the perverse thing that he is consciously doing makes it seem OK to me. I am rather conflicted about this myself, having adopted Chelsea way back in 1967 when I lived there for a year, and their team was second-tier in the old First Division, and the whole world was so different, but finding it very hard to root for them today on TV when they are so obviously parallel in so many ways to the Damn Yankees (the baseball team, not the whole nation).
There are so many enjoyable little moments in this book, especially of two types: the breathless narrative descriptions of particular, concentrated several-second intervals (usually, but not always, leading up to goals) that turn out to be turning points in a game or even the entire season, and the accounts, some more coherent than others, of the constant "devotional" chants of the fans and how ironic it is to reflect on where their tunes originated (most often in the U.S., in a very different context and spirit).
This is a book that may seem sophomoric or even naive to an English Premier League expert, but is really worth the relatively short time spent to read it for many others like me. As others have noted, it could very conceivably be read in one sitting, but it is also very well suited to picking up here and there for a short half-chapter at a time (e.g., during those annoying commercial breaks in televised American sports, with their so-un-soccer-like extended pauses!).

Culpepper is a very good writer and his book gives an entertaining account of what it's like to be a fan of a Premiership club. Culpepper became disillusioned with American sports and moved to England in search of the purity and passion that originally drew him to sports as a boy. As any fan of the EPL can tell you, the reality does not fit Culpepper's hypothesis. The Premiership is as corrupted by money, greed, commercialism, cheating, spoiled players and ill-mannered fans as any pro sport in the US. Probably more so. Culpepper ignored this inconvenient truth for the sake of his book. He could have confronted the reality he found and still pulled off a good, and perhaps even more interesting, story of self discovery. Instead, he chose to make intellectually dishonest arguments that supported his original premise. Some of Culpepper's observations were so inconsistent he was left looking more contorted than David James on a penalty kick. From the start Culpepper did little to disguise his bitterness toward American sports (really American society in general), almost to the point that it was preordained he'd find satisfaction in any alternative. He was so eager to trade in his current ride, any other car would've seemed like a Rolls. The problem here is that the EPL has plenty of the same warts that caused Culpepper to seek solace in the first place. It is not the bastion of purity and innocence that Culpepper imagined. It would have been OK for Culpepper to admit that. In fact, it would have been a deeper, more interesting and certainly more honest effort.

All in all, a worthwhile book, even if the moralizing was a bit much.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable book. Culpepper's trademark brand of literate humor is put to optimal use as he gives the uninitiated American a real sense of the importance of the Premiership, not only to English sports fans but to England itself. Having waited for the book's U.S. release for several weeks, I purchased a copy immediately and finished it in one (very satisfying) sitting. Highly recommended.

I know that in England (and in fact just about everywhere else in the world except for the US), soccer is far more than a sport. It's a way of life. The team you follow is not something taken lightly, and you pledge allegiance to that team through thick and thin. Chuck Culpepper, a burned out sports journalist in the US, decided to head over to London to get a look at the world of soccer, and what a look he got. His book Bloody Confused!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer follows a year of his life as he picked a team to follow, and became immersed in the soccer culture that is so common (again, to everyone in the world except us). The resulting book is humorous, and it makes me want to head over the pond to see a match the way it's supposed to be experienced...

Contents:
Common Sportwriter Malaise; Fumbling Around in Daylight, "F---ing Move!"; Is that Really Chelsea's Pitch?; A Twelve-Inch Digix in Camden; My Very Own Relegation Weekend; Sunday Contempt; Media-Inaccessible England; Two Months to Choose; Clueless; Knowing Too Much; Away Fan; The Best Goal in My Admittedly Limited Lifetime; I Hear My People; Europe; Away Fan Extraordinaire; The Distinct Horror of Rail Replacement; An FA Cup Debutant; Cheering for a Toilet-Seat Thief; "Have We Just...."; Old Trafford; "We Were Mental"; Chimes and Mammals; Lonely Walks He Who Walks to Plainmoor; A Blackburn Fiasco; Never Miss a Chance to Hang Out in a Pub with a Blue Bear; Betraying a Kind Reading Fan; Just Disgusting; Rather Hopeless; You Have to Be Kidding Me; Not-Taken Roads; Adopted; It's Really the Heart of England; Elvis and the Beatles; One Goal from Europe; The Whole Meat Raffle of It All

This book appealed to me on a number of levels. For one, I learned a great deal about how the season is played. In American sports, there's a season of play, followed by playoffs and the championship. In English soccer, there's actually a number of different championships, and a team could conceivably win one or more over the course of a season. Games played during the season often count towards different standings and rankings, so "every game is equal" is not really the case. If you ever get a handle on that, then there's the whole league structure. The top end is the Premier league with 20 clubs, followed by the Championship second division, League One (third division), League Two (fourth division), and Conference (600 other clubs that haven't made it into the big time). Confused yet? Good, because the bottom ranked teams in each division get dropped down one level, and the top teams move up. This is called relegation, and it's why people care whether their team is in 16th or 17th place. Culpepper had to figure all this out, *plus* choose a team to follow. Rather than following the big four (Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Arsenal), he decided to follow Portsmouth, a team that would never win it all, but would put up a struggle to not fall down a ranking either. He then learned that team loyalty is a big deal, and that decision is not one to be made lightly...

I loved his descriptions of going to away games, only to be told he couldn't buy tickets as he didn't have a "purchase history" there. Cuts down on the hooliganism. He spent a number of games watching through openings in the barriers, seeing only fractions of the fields (or other fans). Most amusing was the tradition of singing that takes place in the stands. He covered a number of the songs and chants that would serenade the players all game long. And they don't have lyrics you'd want your four year old repeating, either. Overall, he shows just how much of a role soccer plays in the life of the average person, much like (American) football is to those fanatics that live and breathe for football season each year.

If you don't understand the game of soccer, or if your only exposure has been the sidelines at your kid's games, then you might not quite "get" what Culpepper is talking about. But if you've watched a World Cup match, with 80000 people singing and chanting and drumming all game long, Culpepper's book will give you an inside view as to what drives that passion and devotion.

I thought this was a great book to read. Even though i've been following the EPL for several years, this book brought a bird's eye view of the weekly grind of being a professional sports fan. Great bar stories as well!

I also found it helpful to get a few tips on watching the EPL in person as an American traveler. I've always assumed you could just show up to a match that had seats available, declare your non-allegiance to any particular side and get in. Not so it seems. A little advanced planning is worth the effort or you'll be watching the fixtures like the author did; out in the street looking through holes in the fences.

Only drawback is Culpepper's American political rants here and there but they're sporadic enough to tolerate for an overall great read. I've shared the book w/ several other soccer friends and they've all enjoyed it as well.

This book by Chuck Culpepper is a very well written account of a man who forsakes American sports in search of English football. The humorous chronicle of an American being thrust into the culture of English soccer provides an excellent backdrop as the book examines what makes the English Premiership the most popular sports league in the world...I highly recommend this book to any American who follows the beautiful game cause it describes very well the emotions that are entailed when following a club without being wrought into the culture.

Let me begin by stating my credentials: I know as much about soccer as I know about knitting, which is to say I know very little. Sportswriter Chuck Culpepper knew just a little more than I when he moved to England and decided to become a fan of the Premier League.

During the first part of "Bloody Confused" Culpepper belabors the point that he was suffering from burnout from watching and interviewing pampered American athletes. The fun really begins when the writer allows the reader to get past this and move on to Culpepper's introduction to the Premiership and how he decides which team he is going to adopt as his very own so that he can once again be a "fan."

Reading this book made me want to go to England and begin following the Premiership teams. The idea of traveling the country by train to see the "four mastodons" playing Goliath to the other teams' David sounds great. Watching teams trying to stave off "relegation" sounds very exciting. And watching teams from lower leagues trying to "play up" to achieve Premiership status sounds fantastic.

I'm not sure how "Bloody Confused" will be accepted by people who are already knowledgeable Premiership fans, but it left me wanting to get on the train to go see Portsmouth play Chelsea.

I'm a bit of a budding soccer fan, so I thought I would give this book a try.

Don't get the wrong idea. I loved the parts where he just talked soccer and his reactions to it...I just tend to dislike the parts where he's so blatantly anti-american that I found myself hard pressed to finish even the following page. It's not that i'm a hugely patriotic or anything. More that I find myself understandably offended when the writer continually calls my intelligence into question.

An example?

"With Americans sharing a common inability to view a map and spot, say, Louisiana-this helps explain why it took us four days to get food to sarving Americans after Hurricane Katrina-Americans certainly could not point out Wigan."

Now, i'm sure we're not all the best a geography, but is it really necessary to insult your readers (afterall, a goodly portion of the people who bought this book were Americans) to such a degree that it becomes annoying and tiring? The author could not go two pages without criticizing some facet of America and it's culture/sports/educations system/etc etc. Could the book not have focused more on soccer (since that was what the book was supposed to be about) and less on the fact that the author obviously has some lingering bitterness with his country of birth?

I really think this book could have been great had it simply kept its focus on soccer and less on the author's personal feelings towards the American people.

It's a mostly enjoyable read about an American sports writer's education in English Soccer. Of particular interest are the stories about the hurdles that Culpepper had to go through to get to games, descriptions of the stadiums and their surrounding towns, and his gradual acceptance by the fans of his adopted team, Portsmouth (who are in some serious trouble at the moment. Sorry, Mr. Culpepper). As an American who spent most of his career covering sports in the US, Culpepper offers an interesting perspective, and includes in his book some touching stories that are still to be found in modern sports even though he's clearly grown tired of the excesses of its prima donnas.

On the other hand, I must agree with the other reviewers who found the negative comparisons with the US tiresome. A few of these were cute. After a while, it became an annoyance.

All in all, I enjoyed being a guest on Culpepper's journey.