Amazon.co.uk Review
I was polite. I was respectably attired. Outside the temperature was 90 degrees. But still the barman at the Brabourne Stadium's Wet Wicket Bar would not serve me. Not even a glass of water to wet my wicket.
Aston Villa fan and author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Football Grounds Of Britain, Simon Inglis packs his bags and embarks on a global odyssey in search of the stories behind the world's sport stadia--the legendary, the long-forgotten and the wonderfully obscure. Part-travelogue, part sporting history, part exploratory dissection of his own lifelong obsession with sports grounds,Sightlines chronicles a series of Inglis's real, imagined or remembered stadia experiences.
From Ancient Greece, through India, the Americas and Asia, to the as yet untrammelled venues of the 2000 Sidney Olympics, Inglis is a critical, though clearly devout cleric in the churches of sport. Fortunately for the reader, he never quite loses his sense of astonishment that he is making a living from pursuing what is, by his own admission, a minority interest--and his disarmingly personal and humorous outlook on his adventures makes this lighter reading than you might reasonably expect.
Highlights include his imaginary correspondence with the long-deceased Judge Roy Hofheinz-irresistible force behind the dollar monster that is the Houston Astrodome--and Inglis's observations on the commercial imperative in sport and architecture, as he wanders around this (literally) crumbling temple to modernity and greed, are typically direct and surprising.
The author is almost certainly unique in the depth of his passion for his subject, but never boring. To his credit, this book makes it easy to understand his enthusiasm. --Alex Hankin
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
Every city has a stadium and every stadium has a story. In Sightlines author and self-confessed stadium addict Simon Inglis has pursued his obsession to bring us the weird and wonderful worlds of usherettes at the Houston Astrodome, competing architects in Australia, angry neighbours in Auckland and wistful groundsmen in Bombay. Watching live sport as a regular spectator is all very well, reckons Inglis. But stadiums are far more interesting because in a stadium, whether it be a cathedral of sport or a collection of sheds in the back end of town, you can tune in to the mood of a nation or a community. Starting out at Olympia, where it all began, and ending up in Sydney, venue for the 2000 Games, along the way Inglis encounters anarchic bacchanalia in Pamplona's bull-ring, meets priests at a Gaelic Football final in Dublin and Palestinian refugees living within a few metres of a British-built stadium in Beirut. And in an attempt to come to terms with his obsession he tries aversion therapy by visiting 26 Argentinian football grounds in one week, in the company of a football mad psychotherapist. It doesn't work. He has a great time. The perfect companion volume to his popular books on football grounds. Sightlines is full of insight, wit, anecdotes and characters from a world beyond the view of the ordinary spectator. Read it and you'll never look at a stadium the same way again
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