Soccer samurai - David Bennie

After watching saturation coverage of the 64 games which constituted the Japanese/South Korean World Cup, square-eyed and sleep-deprived Scottish author David Bennie has strung together a series of tough-tackling, left-field "match reports" from the discomfort of his 4F Tartan Army armchair. Such sedentary, stay-at-home participation in World Cup 2002 became inevitable when Scotland bade "sayonara" to the possibility of qualification when they failed to beat Croatia is 2001. Trying to set aside centuries of cross-border rivalry, Bennie attempts to support England during their World Cup campaign, an interesting experiment which leads to high confusion and schizophrenic head games. As the matches are loaded with less emotional baggage, Bennie needs to choose between relatively value-free competing teams and in order to do so he falls back on the differentials of strip design and colour, national histories, current politics, cultural stereotypes and natural sympathy for the footballing underdog. This title combines autobiographical humour, sports writing, pop culture philosophizing, political polemic and the kind of geography lessons you never get at school.