Well welcome to It Was What It Was, and this is a little sneak preview of a bonus edition that is going out on our Patreon today, our Patreon channel, obviously is available with all subscribers, and there's lots of extra content on there including a World Cup

countdown where we go through every tournament we're flicking through old editions of shoot

magazine and there's going to be Q&A's with myself and Jonathan but there are also episodes

like this where we can do a little bit more on the mainstream episodes and this one is with

Bill Buford who really was an iconic

writer in the 1980s. And his book, Among the Thugs, was an extraordinary reportage where he

kind of goes undercover with, amongst other, the Man United hooligans in the 1980s. There

was nothing that had been like it before. It's very similar to the documentary

hooligan in that no one had got this close to football hooliganism in previous reporting.

It's truly an astounding book and there's some extraordinary writing in it. And we thought it'd be

good to catch up with Bill, who was in the UK when he wrote

this book and a very sort of upper-class literary type who managed to find his way amongst

the thugs of English football in the 1980s. That in itself is an extraordinary story. And so we sat down

with Bill and talked to him about how that came about and what his

impressions were of football and society in the 1980s we think this is a really good addition

to the two episodes we've done on hooliganism so we hope you'll take a listen to it and if you

enjoy it sign up to our patreon well the title of the book, Among the Thugs,

that, it strikes me Thugs as sort of in inverted commas in the title,

that Thugs is what other people called them,

but you're sort of exploring what I is.

So I guess there's two separate parts of questions.

What were your expectations of the people you would meet and who were the people you actually met in the course of this?

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