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Chapter 41
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fever Pitch, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Obsession vs. Fandom
Sports, Identity, and Community
Escapism
Sports and Masculinity
Summary
Analysis
Crowd violence at football games becomes increasingly common. Nick attends a match with his friend’s teenage son, Mark. Only a few minutes after the game starts, fans start to mob as a yellow smoke fills the air. Someone screams that it is tear gas. It isn’t, but this causes a panic. The crowd rushes to escape and in the process forces hundreds of spectators, including Nick and Mark, onto the football field. The referees guide the players off the field and the fans back into the stands, and the game continues in silence.
It's not clear exactly what causes the yellow smoke, but it causes chaos and frightens fans, nonetheless. This is another example of football hooliganism, which is continuously on the rise. This type of behavior is evidence of how problematic and dangerous football obsessions can be.
Themes
Nick considers that he is very lucky that Highbury doesn’t have a fence separating the field from the terraces. A few years after this game, many people die at a Liverpool game when the crowd tries to mob the field—they only end up dying because that stadium has a fence, preventing people from spreading out into the field.
The Liverpool game Nick refers to is the 1985 European Cup Final. A mob of Liverpool fans ended up killing 39 people. Nick completely rejects behavior like this, and he finds the violent tendencies of English football fans to be shameful.
Themes
