Joey Rippa is one of the most naturally gifted footballers England's Second Division has ever seen. He's also one of the least interested in that fact.
When Plymouth Argyle's pre-season tour brings him back to his homeland, Australia, for the first time since leaving his beloved Merri Bay, Rippa arrives late, sunburnt, and carrying an impressive holiday paunch. His long-suffering manager Bobby Noll - the man who discovered him surfing a wave in Western Australia and somehow turned him into Plymouth's Player of the Year - is not impressed.
Back in England, Rippa is navigating his second season as a professional footballer with his trademark combination of natural genius and spectacular indifference. He's living in a backpackers hostel populated by 52 nationalities, moonlighting in an underground lawn bowls operation of questionable legality, and trying to hold together a Plymouth side with genuine ambitions of promotion and a maiden trip to Wembley.
There's just one problem. Actually, there are several.
Rolf Bonkovic, the notoriously unimpressed Australian national coach, is finally paying attention, which means Rippa needs to start performing like someone who actually wants to play international football. His sponsor, the magnificently eccentric Thurston Kwibble, has ideas about how Rippa should spend his spare time that range from the mildly unusual to the potentially criminal. And then there's Ned Buckley - younger, fitter, more dedicated, annoyingly talented, and seemingly sent from the universe specifically to make Rippa's life difficult.
Buckley is everything Rippa is not: disciplined, professional, and disturbingly wholesome. He meditates. He keeps a journal. He volunteers in Kenya during the off-season. He also, infuriatingly, appears to be the better footballer.
As the season builds toward a dramatic cup run against Rippa's old nemesis West Ham United, and with his international future hanging in the balance, Rippa is forced to confront the question Bobby Noll has been asking since the day they met on a beach in Western Australia: does he actually want any of this?
Young Pilgrim is the second book in P.J. Laverty's RIPPA! series, a comedy about football, freedom, and a young man who would rather be anywhere else, doing almost anything else, and who is somehow brilliant at the one thing he can't escape. Set against the backdrop of early 1990s English football, with Italia 90 still fresh in the memory and the Premier League just around the corner, it captures a sport and an era on the cusp of change, filtered through the eyes of someone almost entirely unbothered by either.
Funny, warm, and sharply observed, Young Pilgrim builds on the world established in the first book in the series, RIPPA! while standing fully on its own feet. New readers are welcome. Joey Rippa will eventually get around to welcoming them too, once he's finished his surf.
