Lifelong passion for the beautiful game.

Byline: By David Whetstone 

In terms of soccer passion, Robert Rowell is up there with Pele and Shearer. Pity about the skill. David Whetstone met the author of a very funny new football book.

To suggest that football has played an important part in the life of Robert Rowell is a bit like saying that oxygen is a handy aid to health and happiness.

It has been an ever-present, all-pervading interest and obsession, a source of pain and pleasure, a permanent itch demanding to be scratched.

It is the subject of Robert's first and possibly only book, Back Lanes and Muddy Pitches, which publisher Martin Ellis says is the best book on football he has ever read.

Robert's life, to most people, will appear quite enviable. He lives in the south of France, has two loving little daughters and a patient and understanding French wife, Marie-Anne.

Moreover, at the age of 45, he has a proper grown-up career in accountancy. He had a good job, too, until recently when he was able to cash in his shares in the company and buy more time with his family.

Why patient and understanding? Because Marie-Anne is prepared to indulge her Geordie husband his full-blooded weekly kickabouts with "les lads".

And here Robert is, on a brief visit home, sitting in a corner of a Tyneside pub and talking fondly about a thankless sport that has consumed many of his waking moments and probably most of his sleeping ones too.

For Robert, life has been made of dreams. Back Lanes and Muddy Pitches is part autobiography and part lifelong self-delusion, one that will be recognised by many on Tyneside where every street has spawned its scabby-kneed Milburns or Shearers.

Like many soccer daft lads, there's a little bit of Robert that never grew up. You suspect that, while the childhood ginger mop might have gone the way of soccer rattles and Kenneth Wolstenholme, his infant self still lurks just below the surface.

As he tells us, back in the late 1960s and early 70s, his "little world" was a terraced street in Gateshead. But it was transformed in his imagination into one of the greatest football stadia in the world ( St James's Park or Wembley (as was).

"The greatest eight-year-old footballers that ever lived ( Di Stefano, Pele, Maradona, myself," he writes casually, "all had one thing in common: they learned the game the hard way, in the company of lads much bigger than themselvesa"

Robert writes hilariously and affectionately about his relationship with his dad, Harry, "a bit of a Stanley Matthews in his day", who also hated losing, even to his own kids.

From him, he adds charitably, he inherited not only a passion for football but "chicken-legs, an excuse for a chest and milky-white skin ( the sort of bluey-whiteness you cannot get with cheaper washing powders".

In the pub, Robert explains that this was a story straining to be written ( the life, as he puts it in chapter one, of "the one that got away. The failed footballer. Those he played with, those he played against, those he watched."

"I started writing it a few years ago, I remember. I actually started when I was travelling with my work. I was based in Rome and I had to do a lot of travelling around Europe and to the States.

"One day I just started to write. Every trip would see me writing ideas for chapters and the ideas would just come flowing out. I wouldn't say I was a born writer so it did take me ages. It was hard work but also really enjoyable because I was writing about my favourite subject."

Robert left the North-East at the age of 18, waving goodbye to the back lanes and pitted pitches of his childhood, and to team-mates and opponents such as Bradders, Curly, Tubby and Jelly-Pants. Work subsequently took him to Italy and then to France.

But those early footballing memories dog his footsteps. "I went to my first match when I was eight, Newcastle against Sunderland, but I didn't go regularly until I was in my early teens. I hated every minute of it because it's such a tense experience."

Newcastle United forward Wyn Davies was an early favourite. "The first match I went to he scored the first goal, although I couldn't see it because of all the people in front of me." He fancied he had the same hairstyle as Davies which was a source of pride. Robert's account of watching the 1966 World Cup final with his dad, when a neighbour, Mrs Carson, turned up and talked over the final, momentous seconds of the match, is very funny. But he has never been an armchair footballer.

Even now he turns out for a team of village veterans in Saint-ClAment, near Montpellier, and is heartened by the fact that the captain is 59. It seems clear that while they enjoy the social side of playing, and the post-match drink, once on the pitch it's Dean Street, Gateshead (or the French equivalent), all over again. Robert says he enjoyed the process of getting into print, defying Harry's worried plea to use a pseudonym, but isn't sure if there will ever be another. This one I can highly recommend. It will strike more of a chord with the average soccer-mad reader than the ghost-written life story of one of the game's greats.

And while Robert the player may have been cruelly overlooked in successive World Cup campaigns, it's almost certainly safe to say that he writes better than all those who were not.

One who did make the grade as a pro is nephew Steve Stone who plays in the Premiership for Portsmouth. From Robert, the eternal wannabe, there are no hard feelings.

* Back Lanes and Muddy Pitches by Robert Rowell (Zymurgy Publishing, pounds 6.99).