Over thirty years ago, a football reporter for The Observer phoned through to the desk at five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and said: 'I've just thought of an idea for a novel: 'Can you take the report from agency.' The writer was B S Johnson and the idea would in time become The Unfortunates, first published in 1969 and republished by Picador last week.

It tells the story of a football writer arriving at a station and suddenly realising: 'But I know this city!' He is in Nottingham, the town where his close friend Tony Tillinhast lived and worked before he died of cancer. The Unfortunates is a collection of meandering thoughts on the death of his friend, himself, writing, football, architecture and football reporting. It is published in a box containing 27 separate chapters: one is marked first, one last, the other twenty-five can be shuffled around and read in whichever order the reader wishes.

Johnson's aim, according to his friend Zulfikar Ghose - one-time hockey correspondent for The Observer, now Professor of English at Austin University in Texas - was to convey 'the randomness that is the nature of cancer. The randomness that had led the author to write it had begun with a random decision on behalf of a sports editor to assign him a game in Nottingham. And the game itself, which is a series of random moves where chance either makes the ball hit the bar or enter the net, led to the decision to allow the reader to shuffle the pages of the text.

The critics dumped on it. But he had his fans. Samuel Beckett described Johnson as 'a most gifted writer and deserving of far more attention than he has received up to now'. Anthony Burgess wrote: 'He's the only living British author with the guts to reassess the novel form, extend its scope, and still work in a recognisable fictional tradition . . . the future of the novel depends on people like B S Johnson.'

Now, 30 years on, there is a Johnson revival. His books are being re-released and the novelist Jonathan Coe is at work on a biography. He was attracted to Johnson by the endorsement from Beckett - 'a man not normally known for his freedom with dust jacket quotations,' says Coe - and has been a devotee of 'his characteristically ingenious way of conveying complex moments' ever since.

He has occasionally borrowed from him. In Coe's marvellous What A Carve Up! the hero phones through a book review only for the magazine to print, instead of 'the author hasn't the necessary brio', 'the author hasn't the necessary biro'. The book reviewer is sacked. Johnson would have approved: he retired from football reporting after a furious argument over the manner in which the sub-editors had massacred his precious copy.

There is renewed interest not only in Johnson's books but in his films. These are intriguing. One entitled Fat Man on a Beach, made in 1973, involves Johnson, who is indubitably fat, walking up and down the beach, talking to camera, and appearing in ten different coloured shirts. Think of a philosophising, poetry-reciting Ronnie Barker.

During the film Johnson says: 'Everything reminds me of a joke. If I'm lucky.' At the beginning he asks 'Why are we here? . . . I'll have to go and think about that', and walks up and down the same stretch of beach before falling into what is now a grave. At the end, he walks fully clothed into the ocean.

Three weeks later, Johnson committed suicide. But It was not premonition, a point endorsed by Sean Day-Lewis in his TV review written a year later, when the film appeared, in which he described Johnson as 'a man of humour with much capacity for loving and being loved; something less than an artist, and something more'. Novelist, poet, film-maker, Johnson was also a football fan. He went to Chelsea with his dad, and later in life he took his son to Stamford Bridge. 'Whenever he was depressed, which was a lot of the time, he would recall Chelsea's better moments,' says Coe.

'He believed everything was chaos, life was random, that we live in a godless universe and the fortnightly football match gave him some continuity. He had a fanatical loyalty to his team similar to the devotion he felt for his friends.'

His love of football led him to attempt match reports. Only in Clifford Makin's Observer sports section of the time would this have been allowed. Richard Burton would contribute the occasional rugby feature and Professor A J Ayer, when the mood took him, would send in reports which started: 'The match kicked off at 3.00pm prompt.'

According to Dougie Rae, the sub- editor who took the I've-just-thought-of-a-novel call, Johnson was 'pretty flat for a literary whizz-kid, as was A J Ayer. Johnson was always down the page, a miniaturist. Football's version of a Sunday painter'. According to Johnson, his perfect prose was murdered by the sub-editors. His widow, Virginia, can still remember Bryan reading what they had done to his copy on a Sunday morning and 'going mad'.

Having read some of Johnson's subbed match reports and the unsubbed one which appears in The Unfortunates, I'm with Dougie Rae on this one. But Johnson is brilliant on being a football reporter, as I rediscovered in re-reading him yesterday when I took the same rail trip to Nottingham to watch an undistinguished football match. In his book it is City v United - for me it was Forest v County (Stockport, that is).

Johnson arrives and immediately goes for a drink. He finds 'a very live place, customers enjoying their drinking, almost without exception, their conversation, the noise in here, lively mainly middle-aged, the customers here certainly making the most of their drinking this Saturday lunch time, healthy drinking, I could call it, drinking for its own sake, for health's sake, is it?' In the lounge bar I happen upon there are two people. No conversation.

But other things don't change. On his way to the ground Johnson comes across a 'radio shop, now no doubt called television shops, the half-dozen sets going, different programmes, show-jumping and swimming, those apologies for sport on television, while the only sport most people want to watch is soccer, the only real sport, the best, the pathetic ends they go to on Saturday afternoons to cover up the fact that they are not showing football'. Yesterday, Grandstand showed snooker.

And so to the game. Johnson writes: 'Always at the start of each match, the excitement, often the only moment of excitement, that this might be the ONE match, the match in which someone betters Payne's ten goals, where Hughie Gallacher after being floored nods one in while sitting down . . . so hope only for the extraordinary, for the one match: but have to be prepared, as always, in everything, to settle for less.'

Johnson's fictional game is realistically bad. 'Skill was as uncommon as grass,' he writes, only for the sub-editors to take it out. Forest v County is no better, but at least there are goals. A few minutes after Byrne has 'incredibly, no all too credibly' headed over from five yards, Djaffo scores for Stockport. Straight from the kick-off Ian Wright equalises. What's he doing here?

Johnson makes no friends in the press box: 'How ordinary these reporters look, curious lot. I do not talk to them, they do not talk to me.' I, too, have a quiet afternoon. The man on my right blows his nose vigorously without a handkerchief. At half-time, he regales everyone with an anti-semitic anecdote. Having introduced it as the funniest he has ever heard he is forced, when no-one laughs, to alter his verdict to 'terrible, terrible'.

Now, as in Johnson's time, the attendance is passed round. 'A sip, pass it along to the next reporter, 24,833 poor sods have paid good money to see this rubbish,' wrote Johnson. Yesterday, 15,770 unfortunate sods paid even better money to see even poorer rubbish.

Johnson goes to the station after the game in search of a pink 'un to find 'the Chelsea result, down the bottom, nearly, West Brom 1 Chelsea 1, oh, they could have done better, a disappointment, still, it could have been worse.'

Thirty years later I get to the station thinking Chelsea have beaten Arsenal. There is no pink 'un. I ring the office (I'm a Chelsea fan, too) to hear Arsenal have won 3-2. A disappointment, could have done better … couldn't have been worse.