Fever Pitch Details

There isn't a single Arsenal fan who will forget Michael Thomas's last gasp-goal at Anfield on 26 May 1989. Precious few Liverpool supporters can erase its memory either — no matter how hard they try. That breakaway championship winner provides the rousing finale to this hugely entertaining reworking of Nick Hornby's runaway bestseller. But although the film is based on a football fanatic's memoir, don't despair. Even if you don't know your left back from your Ian Wright, there's much more to this romantic comedy than football. It's a bit like a feature version of Men Behaving Badly, with Colin Firth and best buddy Mark Strong buzzing off to Highbury or being glued to the box, while girlfriend Ruth Gemmell and flatmate Holly Aird pass acerbic asides about how incapable the lads are of growing up a particularly pressing problem for Firth, who is about to become a father. The presence of football, fads, fashion aberrations and long-gone TV shows will ensure this story is instantly recognisable, not only to nearly every thirtysomething male in the country, but also to their long-suffering and gently deriding female kin. There were those, however, who felt that there simply wasn't enough football in the film, particularly as the trainspotting-like attention to such details as team selection and kit colours was one of the joys of the book's total obsession with the beautiful game. But abandon all sense of betrayal, because Hornby wrote the screenplay himself and you can always return to your paperback once the credits start to roll.

A small-scale attempt at a romantic comedy, which finds its climax in a real-life event Ð Arsenal's triumph in the last moment of their last game to win the league championship Ð but otherwise indulges in a fantasy of a man behaving badly and getting away