No shirt, no signings, manager apparently on the brink, star player heading to Paris – no wonder LFW is heading off the beaten track for This Week. There follows, a book review.
"You should write a book," they say. We've all said it to that friend who does ridiculous things or ends up in unlikely situations or always has an outlandish story to tell. "Oh mate, you should write a book," we say, wiping the tears from our eyes as he concludes another anecdote.
Mel Huckridge is the bloke who people say "you should write a book" to. He's the bloke who everybody at Rangers knows - the bloke who will travel to Slovenia to watch England Under 21s on a Friday night and then fly back overnight via Belgium and Portugal to make it in time for a 3-3 draw between Stockport and QPR during which he will miss five of the goals through a combination of queuing at the bar, having a row with a steward, and leaving 20 minutes before full time. He's the bloke who will travel to Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest and Barcelona in seven days, seeing bits (but not all, and certainly not all the goals) from nine football matches and then arrive back home in time for the second half of the QPR game followed by an eight hour drinking binge in Shepherds Bush after which 75 per cent of that day's attendance at Loftus Road will decamp to his house and sleep in his garden. That's Mel. "You should write a book Mel." And now he has.
The world of football literature is dominated by three types of book: autobiographies, mostly of wankers like Ashley Cole who are far too young for an autobiography and have nothing of any note to say in any case; books written by people that used to follow Millwall in the 80s with endless reams of drivel about how West Ham turned up with 200 and "got run" and then Luton turned up with 300 and "got run" and Brighton turned up with 400 and "got run"; and books by idiots who live hundreds of miles away from where their team plays but still go to every match and think you might like to read about buffet car fires and Tuesday night treks to Colchester. I've been reading this rubbish for years and you have to search bloody hard to find a good example of the art – The Miracle of Castle di Sangro, A Season With Verona and, errr, that might be about it.
To be honest I've been dreading sitting down to write a review of 'Ground for Divorce', which is a year in the life of Mel the serial ground hopper during the 2009/10 season, charting his progress around Europe to see obscure football matches in random places. I'd like to say I've never written a 'puff piece' for a friend in my career, but it's not true. Once, when working on the prestigious Ripley and Heanor News, I did a story about a butcher's award winning meat pie in exchange for a very large example of the winning recipe. But apart from that I've maintained integrity. I count Mel as a mate, and we'll have a drink together from time to time, so writing a review of his book has been playing on my mind. What would happen if it was rubbish? Would I just be honest and say "tried hard but it's a load of shit" or would I lie? A bloody minefield, that's what this is - how to lose friends and alienate people.
After chapter one I feared the worst. The trick of a really good football book is to make it sing for people who don't like, or don't know a lot about, football. To focus on the culture of the places visited, to explore the character of the people met, to delve into the history of a club or a fixture or a place so that the actual match action becomes a mere side issue. A Season With Verona begins with a racial incident in the city, where a black employee at the university claims he has been beaten by racist thugs on his way home from work. The factions divide and rise up against each other, some believe he has made the whole thing up, others see it as endemic of a racist society. It's the best part of 50 pages before there is any football played at all. Mel's book starts with football, and drinking, and name dropping of friends and message board posters who the reader doesn't know, and therefore doesn't care about.
I purchased a copy of Grounds For Divorce from Mel after a midweek home game at the back end of last season, read that first chapter on the tube home, closed the book and left it on a shelf in my flat hoping to God Mel would forget that I'd said I'd review it. He didn't, and a few weeks after the end of the season he was part of a gang of LFW posters who met in a pub in the city for a lunchtime beer that turned into an all afternoon session. It was here that he told me he felt he'd "got into it" and enjoyed it more as he went along, finding his writing style, and then asked me once again for a review on LFW. With that in mind I picked it up again and tried for a second time.
And it's terrific. A slow starter, granted, but by the time the book is into September it's into its stride and it never lets up. Mel's enthusiasm for his subject - which ranges from football, history, culture, drinking and travel - shines through in every line and by the time I'd passed the halfway point I couldn't put it down. Compare the first 'man goes to football and gets drunk with people you've never heard of' chapter to his trip later in the season to Accrington Stanley and the writing is poles apart. He's at his absolute storming best when heading to Accrington, and another chapter where he goes to Arbroath for a Scottish league fixture - although I doubt the book's true hero, long suffering wife Bea, would agree.
You'd be forgiven for thinking the Premiership is the only thing that actually matters in British football but by travelling to Morecambe and other places like it and talking to people who follow the lower and non-league teams around he shines the light on issues that are vital to the future of the game in this country, but often largely ignored by the mainstream football press.
His encyclopaedic knowledge of the sport, and other things besides, is there for all to see - when he speaks of Escape To Victory the facts and 'did you knows' rattle out like machine gun fire and there' not a hint of Wikipedia research, or know-all, about it.
He drives me mad in places, because why on earth you'd go all the way to Swansea to watch QPR play and spend the second half downstairs drinking lager out of a plastic bottle and watching the action on a screen is beyond me. As is the idea of travelling all the way to Hungary for a members only game, and not getting your act together fast enough to meet the 5pm membership deadline and therefore not actually getting into the match at all. But this is Mel, and it makes the book what it is.
Chapters end with round ups of what's going on elsewhere in the footballing world at that time, with opinions thrown in. He's not short of an opinion isn't Mel, and there's not much to disagree with in what he says. By the time I reached the end, set during England’s disastrous World Cup campaign, I was disappointed it had finished as it was really throttling along by that point.
It does fall into the trap of talking to the reader as if they are a football fan who knows who Sven Goran Eriksson and Paul Hart are at times, but if you are and you do then this is a great book for you. Very different and a welcome change from the drudgery of the accepted football book standards mentioned above.
The two points that are never addressed are why and how? Why does he do all this and how does he afford it? "It's a Tuesday night in April so I've scanned the fixture lists and settled on a trip to see Sutton United, the third time I'll have seen Sutton this season." Why? Why Berlin and then Hungary and then Spain? And how? There's occasional reference to accumulated airmiles but otherwise one can only assume that, with a young boy to bring up and another more recently arrived since publication, that Mel is one of a number of QPR fans I know who has succeeded in growing a magic money tree in his garden.
Leave him to worry about the logistics, you enjoy the results in Grounds for Divorce which for a first work is something to really be proud of.
Copies of Grounds for Divorce can be bought on eBay or direct from Mel on e-mail at melh64@hotmail.co.uk