Steve Fist was the football hooligan's football hooligan and Bottle is his story, so it follows that he is now the ex-football hooligan turned writer's ex-football hooligan turned writer. Between the years 1975 and 1991, not one day went by when he didn't beat the absolute living crap out of at least one person for belonging to another team's firm, looking at him, thinking about looking at him, looking at his bird, thinking about looking at his bird, knocking over his pint or breathing. It's a story about the extreme end of extreme violence, but at the same time it's a tale about the worst excesses of brutality, sadism and senseless bloodshed. It's not for the faint-hearted or, indeed, the illiterate; in fact, it's not for anyone, really. Steve threatened the publishers with a sledge-hammer and, hey presto, the book got published, but then that's how Martin Amis started, allegedly, so who knows what it might lead to? The Booker? The Pulitzer? Or maybe even the Nobel Prize for Literature? One thing is for certain, though: it's a story that every youngster thinking about a career in violence should read or have read to them, because thinking you're hard is one thing, being hard is another, but writing a book about how hard you were - now that's hard.

Ivor Baddiel is not hard. He never has been and he never will be. In fact, he's soft as the proverbial. But he's been a Chelsea fan all his life, and in his three previous lives, so he knows what's what. He's also written some other books and stuff for TV and that, so he helped Steve out a bit with this one.