Following On

A Memoir of Teenage Obsession & Terrible Cricket

It's one thing to be 14 years old and a loser. It's one thing to be the class swot, and hopelessly infatuated with someone who doesn't know you exist. But what kind of teenager is besotted with an entire sports team – when the players are even bigger losers than she is?

In 1993, while everyone else was learning Oasis lyrics and crushing on Kate Moss or Keanu, Emma John was obsessing over the England cricket team. She spent her free time making posters of the players she adored. She spent her pocket money on Panini stickers of them, and followed their progress with a single-mindedness that bordered on the psychopathic.

The primary object of her affection: Michael Atherton, a boyishly handsome captain who promised to lead his young troops to glory. But what followed was one of the worst sporting streaks of all time – a decade of frustration, dismay and comically bungling performances that made the English cricket team a byword for British failure. 

Nearly a quarter of a century on, Emma John wants to know why she spent her teenage years defending such a bunch of no-hopers. She seeks out her childhood heroes with two questions: why did they never win? And why on earth did she love them so much?

Following On is published by Bloomsbury.

WINNER OF WISDEN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017

“A gloriously funny yet poignant memoir… such was the delight it gave me that I ended up rationing myself as I read it, so that I wouldn’t gorge on it all at once. Following On is a delightful book”
Tom Holland, The Guardian

“Truly original, clever, funny, poignant and passionate” 
Clare Balding

“The comparisons to Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch are justified” 
The Independent

“Wittily and charmingly combines adolescent excess with grown-up irony and perspective. Sport hasn't seen anything quite like this” 
Simon Barnes

“Deftly comic, wonderfully true, for anyone who has ever thought that England, chasing 600 in the fourth innings, just might do it” 
Gideon Haigh

“A beautifully constructed and painfully honest memoir of blind loyalty to an unworthy sporting team” 
Lynne Truss

“A touching and funny account of a cricketing era that though recent also feels very long gone” 
Miles Jupp

“Wonderful, funny, elegantly turned and strikingly perceptive. Above all it has a warmth you don't often find in cricket writing”
Marcus Berkmann

“A winner – funny, warm, perceptive, and wonderfully evocative”
Michael Simkins

“Consistently witty and full of wonder” 
Arthur Smith

“A fresh and lively read”
The Observer

Read about Emma’s second book,
Wayfaring Stranger, here