He was intrigued by them. "They were strong teams from a different culture and area to the one I had been brought up in. And sometimes they didn't like me very much," he jokes.

The London-based teacher has just published his first novel, Blackmoor, inspired by events at Arkwright Town, near Chesterfield, in the eighties.

At Arkwright, after the miners were defeated in the strike they were to have a second bruising, this time from nature.

Escaping methane gas made the entire village unsafe. It had to be knocked down and residents were transferred to a modern new estate a mile or so away.

The book traces the lives of the villagers and how they were affected by events surrounding the condemnation of their homes.

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Hogan insists that Blackmoor is not just Arkwright but an amalgam of the villages he has known. But it did trigger off the novel.

"I can't remember when I first came across the story, probably in a national newspaper," he says.

"It had great potential for me as a metaphor of the past coming back to get you."

His hero Vincent is considered a bit odd, from a family set apart from the rest of the village of Blackmoor.

Vincent eventually wins acceptance through his footballing skill while Hogan himself is a pretty nifty midfielder.

He insists this is the only thing he shares with Vincent. His own skill is inherited.

"My father came from Ireland to Derby County in Cloughie's time but never got further than the reserves. There was no place for a five foot tall Irishman!"

The book took Hogan, aged 28, five years to write and research, in between teaching, and another two to find a publisher.

He teaches at a South London College, having abandoned the idea of journalism.

He studied at Sheffield College. "It was too hard for me!" he says.

Hogan captures the mood of mining communities in the aftermath of the strike. He has a memorable scene when the remaining residents walk out of the village together for the very last time – as miners had walked away from closed pits behind the band.

He writes they did so "to the tinny sound of the colliery band, now firmly established as the musical harbinger of misfortune and defeat."

It's sad, says Hogan, that the only physical record of Arkwright is a sign on the edge of a roundabout.

"A hundred years of settlement ends up as a piece of brick."

Blacmoor is published in paperback by Simon & Schuster at £11.99.

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