Sightlines: A Stadium Odyssey Book

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 HankinRead More