Chasing Rainbows: From Innocence to Purgatory and Redemption as a Compulsive Sports Fan

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.