Fever Pitch: Chapter 21 Summary & Analysis

After Nick starts watching games from the North Bank, an adult terrace, he also begins to share the crowd’s rage when any away team scores a goal. At one game, Coventry scores a goal that is particularly maddening to Arsenal fans. For the first time in his life, Nick is so enraged that he joins in the Arsenal fans’ threatening chants to Coventry fans. He thinks that ff he were close to a Coventry fan in the moment, he would hit them.

In the present, Nick finds this behavior embarrassing, though he still feels angry when the opposing team scores. He posits that masculinity is a cluster of traits from which one can pick and choose. Women tend to believe, Nick thinks, that if a man likes football he also drinks heavily and is misogynistic. This isn’t the case, Nick now realizes, but when he was a teenager, he thought that if he was an Arsenal supporter, then he also had to be aggressive and belligerent. Nick reflects that he was trying to muster as much masculinity as he could through Arsenal, partially because his father wasn’t around.