Chasing Rainbows
From Innocence to Purgatory and Redemption as a Compulsive Sports Fan
by Ben Dobson
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Pub Date 28 Apr 2022 | Archive Date 2 Jun 2022
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Description
“ A very funny book…I laughed out loud. And very relatable too. As this book captures perfectly, sport can be a strange and frustrating mistress” Stuart Broad MBE
Have you ever wondered if you have your sport / life balance out of kilter? Have you forgotten that in life’s rich tapestry your team’s last minute, VAR assisted defeat at Burnley really matters not a jot and letting this ruin your, and your family’s, weekend is a rather charmless and pointless thing to do? Are you concerned that for something which is supposed to be life-enhancing entertainment following sport seems to deliver rather a lot of frustration and disappointment? Or did its disappearance in the maelstrom of a global pandemic have you reassessing and yearning for its return?
Chasing Rainbows is a reflection on a life dominated by sport. Revisiting some of the most exciting and, more frequently, soul-destroying moments in English sport in the last half century, it seeks to make sense of the dichotomy that although being an English sports fan can occasionally enhance a life’s enjoyment, it primarily delivers nothing but pain, frustration and disappointment, leaving the unaffected baffled as to why we let something we can’t control dominate our life’s experience. It is a personal story of pathological obsession, but is perhaps yours too? It is for all those who recognise this condition and have had their mood ruined for a day, a week, a month or a year, to a totally inappropriate extent, by their addiction to their teams or their heroes and by some perceived sporting ‘disaster’. Chasing Rainbows is a humorous attempt to assess the role sport should, and does, play in our lives.
A Note From the Publisher
Available Editions
EDITION | Ebook |
ISBN | 9781803138701 |
PRICE | £5.99 (GBP) |
PAGES | 200 |
Featured Reviews
The best part of this book was the trip down memory lane and reminiscing about similar things I did in my childhood as the author did. It was enjoyable reading about the sporting stuff (bar the cricket, not a fan of it!) from the fan point of view but the book did seem to be very padded out with too much personal chit-chat to truly enjoy it.
I absolutely loved this book! It is a witty feast of sporting nostalgia which is the backdrop to an intelligent, erudite and, to this reader at least, note-perfect examination of what it means to be a sports obsessive. Ben Dobson describes in great detail and with pin-point accuracy how sports obsessives can reach the point where following a sports team or teams becomes so warped that the fear of defeat comes to exceed the anticipation of success and any enjoyment can only be had when the contest is over and victory has been secured.
I gave this book 5 stars but I must add a heavy caveat to my enthusiastic rating : it comes from a fellow sports obsessive. Those who are not sports obsessives, or even regular sports fans, may not enjoy the sporting nostalgia as much as I did; and they may not even begin to understand the mindset that means it is almost too stressful to watch your favourite sports team or teams because the consequences of defeat are too painful to contemplate.
To paraphrase slightly what a great footballing sage once said “Sport is the most important of the unimportant things in life” and Ben Dobson captures this superbly.