FOOTBALL: Vertigo: One Football Fan's Fear of SuccessBy John Crace Constable, 284pp. £12.99

JOHN CRACE is the man who, among other journalistic pursuits, writes the Digested Read column for the Guardian, with its clever pastiches giving the flavour of new and classic books so that readers don't have to go to the trouble of ploughing through them themselves. (See, for example, his recent clinical compression of Julian Barnes's Booker-prize favourite, A Sense of an Ending.) He is also a fan of Tottenham Hotspur FC, and it is this affliction that is the subject of his new book, Vertigo: One Football Fan's Fear of Success.

Given Crace's occupation as a parodist and the book's north London setting it is hard to avoid the suspicion that this is going to be Nick Hornby's Fever Pitchas full-length spoof, the revenge of the Spurs man on the Gooner. The two writers do have plenty in common, as it happens, and are of the same generation, but while Hornby's innovative memoir looks back through the decades at life on the hazardous pre-Premier League terraces, Crace's focuses firmly on the opulent modern era and, specifically, on last season, when Spurs embarked on their first and unexpectedly impressive foray into Champions League football.

Crace believes that being a Spurs fan is a unique form of masochism, and quotes a study concluding that they are the most stressful top-tier club to support, in terms of confounded expectations, late goals conceded, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory and so on. So to be sitting in the San Siro, in Milan, last autumn when Gareth Bale scored his sensational hat-trick against the European champions, Inter, and then to return there to see his team beat AC, was a joy that was also profoundly unsettling for a pessimistic depressive who only went to the latter match because his shrink, a fellow Spurs obsessive, told him he’d be mad to miss it even if further panic attacks were the consequence.

Reassuringly perhaps, Spurs reverted to normality by losing heavily to Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-finals. At this point, with the European odyssey over and sporting mediocrity restored, Crace allows a bit more space in his book for the nonfootballing elements of his story. We learn about his difficult childhood as a small-town vicar’s son, about his secretive, expensive and time-consuming habit of collecting memorabilia (he aims to amass every Spurs match ticket from 1960 onwards) and about the recurring depressions that have led on occasion to stints in mental hospital (where no one wanted to watch the football on TV).

As with Hornby, there are also the family relationships threatened or cemented by football, especially those with his teenage son and his wife, Jill, who, though exasperated by the way he constructs his life around the fixture list, is perhaps also grateful for the space his obsession gives her.

Then there are his Spurs fellow travellers, a kind of collective midlife crisis traipsing through the streets, stations, stadiums and motorway cafes of England and Europe, bickering about their musical tastes and niggling about the respective striking talents of Crouchie and Pav. More seriously, there’s also the debate about whether it is seemly for a group of middle-aged men to celebrate their club’s Jewish connections by proudly chanting “Yiddo” whenever one of the players does something skilful.

Although Crace strives hard to convince us of the agonies of fandom, he instead – which is perhaps his real intention – succeeds best in conveying its pleasures. Who could argue with his contention that football is a place where the anxiety of day-to-day existence is suspended, overridden by something more immediate and coherent? And even if the fan-memoir form is getting a little tired at this stage, the journey through Crace’s football year, even for a non-Spur, is so congenial that you don’t want it to end.

A season ticket for one of London’s top grounds, quality football from a successful team, a cosy coterie of like-minded individuals with the means and pretext for regular jaunts to major European cities: it doesn’t sound that bad, does it?

He should try being a West Ham fan.

Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist