In his memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Gunner, former football journalist Patrick Mangan relives the agony and the ecstasy of growing up in rural Australia in the 1970s as an Arsenal-FC-supporting English immigrant cast helplessly adrift from the mother country. Like Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch set among the gum trees and the dust, this is the tale of a scrawny Pommy kid falling desperately in love with the world game, the Gunners and the Socceroos, as well as his unrelenting - occasionally unfathomable - crusade to convert the pagans of the Aussie outback to his noble cause

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