A Season with Verona by Tim Parks

This book starts off brilliantly with the tale of a boozy, drug-fuelled organised coach journey for Verona fans to a far-flung away match. The chapter blew me away and I thought I was in for a real treat as I continued through the book. Unfortunately though that chapter was the book’s highlight and the other chapters couldn’t compare with some proving to be a lot poorer. For example chapters where the author went on a tangent and talked about something completely unrelated to football but tried to tie it in somehow. A case in point was when instead of analysing a particularly heavy defeat for Verona at the hands of Roma the author instead of talking about the football instead dissected an antiquated Italian poem which I thought made for particularly heavy reading. These instances made chapters resemble academic essays which wasn’t the light football-related reading I was expecting.

Other gripes include that the coverage of a Verona cup exit only gets a one-line mention as he couldn’t bring himself to write about it (similar to the Roma game which was neglected and replaced as mentioned above) and that his views are totally biased towards Verona. For example when the Veronese fans get picked on by the police or rival hooligans then he is up in arms against those that have committed this violent deed. Yet when differing factions in the Verona crowd come against each other he merely glosses over it. Also Italian phrases are used regularly through the book so try and stick them into your memory bank when you first come across them as they are likely to be repeated later on. Failing that keep your Italian phrasebook handy.

But other things are good. The author went to the efforts of contacting the club to let them know about the book before it was written and they granted him access to the team on various occasions through the season including where he accompanied them to an away trip. Unfortunately I feel this magnificent opportunity was not utilised fully and little insight seemed to be gained from these meetings although Verona fans may find things like the club’s income and expenditure figures and brief biographies of some of their playing squad of interest.

Overall though Tim Parks is obviously an accomplished writer and the book is jam-packed with material on all sorts about Italian football, Italy and their culture. However if he’d left out all the other unnecessary asides from the book and focused more on the actual football and the passion of his fellow fans like he did in the first chapter then I feel he would have made an okay book into an all-time classic.

(This book is available to buy here.)