Meet the popstar whose favourite book about football… is about hooliganism
(Image credit: Darren Bell/Getty Images for Black British Theatre Awards)
What's your favourite book about football? One 2000s songstress has a fantastic answer.
Cass Pennant's eponymous autobiography, Cass, is an astonishing tale of hooliganism, with Pennant detailing tales of how he was shot three times in the chest and still kept on fighting and how he saved Frank Bruno from an attack.
So imagine FourFourTwo's surprise during a chat with soul singer Beverley Knight, when somewhat in contrast to her polite and polished stage presence, Knight proclaimed that Cass was her book about football.
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"My husband – a Norwich fan – was once a bit of a wrong’un when it came to going to football, and sometimes got up to no good," the Shoulda Woulda Coulda singer told FFT.
"I became fascinated by that hooligan world and watched the movie Cass about a black guy being the head of a firm, which I wouldn’t have imagined. You didn’t see black men with hooligans, by and large, and certainly not leaders of the firms.
British football hooligan, leader of West Ham United's Inter City Firm and author Cass Pennant, has a fan in Beverley Knight (Image credit: David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images)
"When I was kid, football wasn’t always as welcoming off the pitch for people of colour, so I was interested in how a black man could be the boss of a West Ham firm, plus the way he turned his life around after that.
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"Watching the film led to me reading the book – I’d love to have a chat with Cass Pennant one day."
Chris joined FourFourTwo in 2015 and has reported from more than 20 countries, in places as varied as Ivory Coast and the Arctic Circle. He's interviewed Pele, Zlatan and Santa Claus (it's a long story), as well as covering the World Cup, AFCON and the Clasico. He previously spent 10 years as a newspaper journalist, and completed the 92 in 2017.
