Bloody Casuals: Diary of a Football Hooligan

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He saw the Liverpool casuals with their trendy haircuts, branded golf and sporting clothing, and struggled to get his head around it. Excited at the prospect, as we always were when the Dons played a non-Scottish (particularly English) team and on the lookout for some mischief, we got tickets in the South Stand right next to the fence dividing us from the Everton travelling support. I should also add that I read a lot of non-fiction, mostly history, but some science-related stuff, too. At a soccer match, of course, the outsiders are the opposing team, its supporters, and in some cases the match officials.

Most climbers don't need 30,000 of their mates at their back egging them on before they have the guts to climb. Eventually, the game ended and we all went our separate ways – although I heard later there was fighting between the two sets of supporters that night which was wholly predictable; if history has taught us anything about what happens when two groups of people who can’t understand each other come into contact, it’s that. The only thing that linked the two was they happened, for this brief moment in history, to be together at the same time and place.CS has to get credit for actually putting Hearts on the "Hooligan book Map" don't see/hear anyone else putting pen to paper. Great halycon days, no longer did people stand by and let our City be overran and destroyed by the old firm tinks, non football people avoided the town centre like the plague when either of them were up here, we then took it to them in their own back yard.

Throughout the autobiography, Jay, describes the life of a soccer casual, from the short journeys to the Schooner (pub) before home games, to the long distance ferry to Gothenburg for the most famous game in Aberdeen's history. It's the thing that the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket is trying to bring out, and it's the thing that helped fuel the genocide in Rwanda, or the Japanese defense of Iwo Jima. ASC became the talk of the town, as Jay said: "People were talking about Aberdeen on the park and we wanted them to talk about Aberdeen off the park as well. Feel a bit guilty though as someone left it behind the bar in my local for me to read, it went round the bar before I eventually got it, and I still have it to this day.Incidentally there are few finer ways to wind up a cod head than to point out that the ASC cacked themselves from a single Hibs yoof with "flames". Remember my brother getting his face re arranged when trying to get through Celtic fans when swapping ends at half time.