The Tale of One Woman's Love Affair With The Beautiful Game

May 29, 2014 - PRLog -- “Bobby Moore changed my life.  He made me a writer and, perhaps more bizarrely, a classics scholar.  He also opened a door for me into the wonderful and painful world of football obsession – a place from which I have never returned.”

Bobby Moore to Thierry Henry – A Girl’s Own Story is a fan story told by a woman, for women (and men) who love football. Cambridge based author Liz Heade takes us on a journey from her first World Cup in 1970 when, aged ten, she fell in love with Bobby Moore, to shortly after Japan & South Korea in 2002, when she replaced her husband with a cat (and Thierry Henry).

“I wrote the book for my nephew Elliot,” Liz explains. “We came up with the idea a couple of World Cups ago during a train journey from London to Cambridge, when we discovered that this 14-year-old boy and his 46-year-old auntie both measured their lives in the four-year cycle of football World Cups. We remembered every goal, every player, every squeal of delirium, every heart-broken sob – not from following one country’s team, but from following all of them.”

Liz’s story is filled with humorous accounts of the love, loss and adventures of a life lived in the background of World Cup tournaments. She tells how in 1970’s Dublin she shocked the nuns who taught her by announcing she was going to be a football commentator; chose to study classics rather than modern languages following England’s devastating loss to the Germans; and remembers the men who tried to win her heart (including one to whom she was briefly married) but who just couldn’t compete with her commitment to football, and left.

Alongside her memoirs, Liz also questions whether men and women can live happily together as football fans, contemplates the caprice of the football gods and asks why life can never live up to the beauty of football.

Liz Heade is a lifelong football fan, sometime lawyer and proud owner of the Thinking Woman’s Football Blog. Born and educated in Dublin, she now divides her time between London, where she works as a lawyer, and her village home in Cambridge, where she writes about football. The cover illustration for the book is by Dan Leydon.

PUBLICATION DATE 28th May 2014

Ebook eISBN: 9781783067237       Price: £3.99