It's written by two brothers, both Watford supporters and both involved in violence in the past. For obvious reasons, the authors are unwilling to go into any detail about their activities and leave it to anonymous accounts to flesh out their arguments. For that reason, I wouldn't get too hung up on the Watford angle - you get little more than a paragraph about Craig Ramage and a lot of waffle about hating Luton, both of which you can get for a quid by buying a copy of Clap Your Hands.

It gets off to a truly hideous start, the brothers Brimson appearing intent on establishing themselves as "true fans" in direct opposition to the scorned "intellectuals". Thus, during the course of the introduction, we are treated to such visionary statements as "Women like football. They don't love it or worship it, they like it." as they attempt to explain why violence occurs at matches. Personally, I don't cough up seven pounds to be bored by conservative toss like that.

Resist the urge to chuck the book in the bin, though, because the rest ain't that bad. What follows is formed of a series of letters and interviews, linked by the brothers' minimal narrative. It's functional stuff but strangely compelling.

Anyone who's watched and listened at English football grounds in the last twenty years will learn little new from this but there's a certain interest to be found in filling in the gaps. Sadly, the stories themselves rarely live up to the intensity of their subject matter. It takes a bloody good writer to deal with violence convincingly and no-one here is up to the job - what we get instead is an endless supply of "We got a decent size mob together and gave them a right slapping". The incidents themselves are fascinating, often very revealling, but the prose is just so lame that the whole exercise rapidly becomes rather sterile.

Ultimately, the brothers take the helm and the book is at its best in the final chapters, as factual reporting gives way to reasoned argument. While the continual adoption of the pompous "We, the decent supporters" tone tends to grate bearing in mind the writers' less-than-angelic past, much of what is said makes sense. Even at its most contradictory (and it is frequently very contradictory - one moment, they're criticising all and sundry for ticket price rises that alienate the ordinary supporters; a couple of pages later, they're advocating noon kickoffs to discourage away supporters), there's a certain debate-in-a-pub enjoyment to be found.

But it's that quality to the book that rather begs the question of what it's target audience is. To regular fans, it's simply another book about football, albeit with a new angle; to outsiders, who do have much to learn about football violence, it'll probably be just a bit too supporter-orientated to be approachable.

It's a good read and little else. Despite the claims to comprehensive inside information, I still came away with questions unanswered - the importance of the match (for example, Oxford and Brighton fans recently caught the police out by arranging a fight on the other side of town while the match was in progress - what's that all about, eh?), the acceptability of weapons, the dividing lines between ordinary fans and hooligans. All of these are hinted at, none are explored in any kind of depth. That's the kind of book this is - just too shallow to make sense of something so complex.