‘A wonderful book – I was helplessly absorbed’ – Bill Bryson   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.   ‘Utterly beguiling’ – Geraldine Doogue, Radio National, Australia ‘Exuberant and self-deprecating’ – The Age ‘Dead-set fantastic – I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever read a book’ – Santo Cilauro, co-host of Santo, Sam and Ed’s Total Football   Originally published as Offsider by Melbourne University Press

Patrick Mangan was born in north London and his family migrated to Australia when he was five. In the mid-1990s, he became editor of 'Soccer Australia' magazine and later worked as the soccer reporter for 'The Sunday Age' and 'The Age'. Patrick is beginning to accept that he will never play for Arsenal. But he hasn't yet given up on the Socceroos.