Sport Book of the Week: Testosterone tosh from terrace trash

The Geezers' Guide to Football: A Lifetime of Lads and Lager (Mainstream Publishing, pounds 7.99 paperback) by Dougie Brimson

NEXT TIME you're at a match, look around. If Dougie Brimson's right, the majority of the crowd will be young-ish men who think they're the proverbial dog's wedding tackle. As well as arrogant, they are loud, smartly dressed and sexist sexist. They may look like superannuated casuals. But to those in the know-what-I-mean, they are geezers.

Brimson and his brother Eddy have cornered the market in books about what he defiantly terms, in the age of the omnipresent plastic seat, "the culture of the football terrace". They come across like a post-hooligan version of EastEnders' Grant and Phil Mitchell, though Dougie dismisses them as role models because their machismo lacks the key component: a passion for football.

So who, or what, is a geezer? The high-profile examples Brimson offers are Chris Evans, presumably for his boozy bonding with Gazza, and Danny Baker, for his allegiance to Millwall, "the ultimate geezer club" (an epithet also carelessly bestowed on Chelsea). Yet that pair, surely, are too cosy with the world of TV luvvies to be true geezers.

Nor can one imagine them being so boorish about the opposite sex. The terrace, Brimson argues, is "tragically the very last bastion of our once male-dominated culture ... where boys can grow up and act like proper men...scream, shout, abuse, swear, even cry if we like without feeling like some effeminate twat". Anyone who believes that "birds" have a right to be there "can piss off right now".

This intolerance, which makes the worst MCC backwoodsman sound like a feminist, extends to "scarfers", "anoraks" and "gits" (all self-explanatory), plus "sads" (ex-geezers with kids) and "new breeds" (middle-class entryists). The space devoted to sneering at them is revealing, for he finds it easier to explain the antithesis of geezerdom than define it.

Addressing the reader as a wannabe, he provides a patronising consumer's guide: what to wear, smoke and drink, even how to choose a club to follow. Replica shirts and popular brands such as Nike are out; golf jackets and labels such as Duffer of St George in. The contradiction inherent in this "feminine" emphasis on clothes escapes Brimson, as does the paradox of an elite one can literally buy into.

His thesis is further discredited by irony-free advice on insults to bawl at players: Irish thick, long hair gypo, etc. Among the lighter moments which hint at a potential given better subject matter are his instructions for impromptu emptying of the bowels on away trips. The chapter on violence, a balancing act between warning how to avoid a kicking and nostalgia for bygone rucks, suggests he is already typecast.

The geezer supposedly brings "class, passion, noise and humour" to football. Brimson fails to make a case for his existence as distinct from society's identikit lager lout, let alone for celebrating such testosterone-fuelled tosh.