Saturday 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football Page 2

  Or you may just wish to enjoy the home comfort of it all from a distance, and take heart in the feeling that when you support a football team, you are never, ever alone.

  7

  LISTENING TO THE RESULTS IN A CAR

  I associate traffic jams with my early years of going to football. With ten minutes to go in a match, I would watch people urgently shuffling their way out of the ground. ‘They’re trying to beat the traffic,’ my dad would say. I couldn’t believe this. Still can’t. At 0–0 there’s always chance of a winner, at 1–2 a last-minute equaliser to make Saturday night sing. When your team loses, at least stay until the end and shake your head or boo at them as they trudge off. Expressing your view at the final whistle is your entitlement, as players and managers will remind you in post-match interviews, passive aggression dripping through their words. And who will make sure the referee is aware of his incompetence well past tea time, if not you? That said, perhaps the early leavers are right, because they are assured of being able to listen to the results in the car.

  After the final whistle, if we weren’t waiting for autographs, Dad and I would run to the car and sometimes catch the Sports Report theme music in full swing. Now, merely whistling those thrilling, playful first few bars sprays goosebumps down my spine. The day’s headlines from Arsenal and Aintree would be proclaimed, the music would cut as if grave news were imminent and James Alexander Gordon would be introduced with reverence, a dignitary being announced at a royal ball. As those moveable plastic heating vents steamed the windows and we joined the contemplative thousands in their stationary cars, Gordon took me to faraway places. It was Scotland which seemed the most romantic; all those Thistles and Albions, Queen of the South and Hamilton Academicals. I longed to find out exactly where the towns of St Mirren and St Johnstone were.

  Though reality has stripped that exoticism from the experience (I now live in Scotland), to listen to the results in the confined space of a car remains therapeutic. It is the shipping forecast for us football fans. Simple rhythms of team and scoreline are soothing and transfixing. The sound is kept within the vehicle’s frame, as if the score reader is sharing cosy tidings of three-alls and one-nils with only those present. There is music still in the geographies of place and mind, of thinking about other lives in other towns, of other fans suffering traffic jams in Oldham and Torquay. This is a soothing marriage: happy solitude and being part of something bigger.

  8

  BALL HITTING BAR

  There are occasions when, defying logic, hitting the crossbar is better than scoring. The chain reaction it provokes makes that so. Hit the bar early on in the game and your fellow supporters ignite. Perhaps it is that we all imagine the ‘donk’ of ball-on-bar, a sound we can’t hear above ourselves. It teases out of us round-mouthed ‘aaaaawwwww’ noises. Rueful hands are placed on heads but within seconds calamity has matured into motivation: teeth are gritted, hands smashed together at pace, and indecipherable yet hopeful cries of encouragement are hollered. The team have hit the bar early, and today we will be loud and our lads will get four. Had it gone in? A dull 1–0, ‘we’ve scored too early’, or even worse.

  Hitting the bar is better than other ways of not scoring. Striking a post means higher potential for netting from a rebound, making it is a less weighty form of miss. Having a shot well saved is inferior to both – it implies that human interference can stop us from scoring, when we all know that goals, misses and wins are down to luck and us chanting. Hitting the bar just looks better too. The ball’s elevation and path possess an innate visual appeal. Perhaps this attraction resides in the way it can thrust and soar like a rocket, and in the sense that, as football should really be played on the ground, the ball is acting disobediently.

  There is variety in how a ball clatters the bar. A speculative shot or lob from distance leaves time for expectation to build. A thunderous header pounds the heart. Of course, it can be crushing: a late chance missed prompting stamped feet and desolate histrionics.

  When ball hits bar, it cannons in unpredictable directions like a welder’s sparks. Its part in the chaos of football should be cherished.

  9

  PRE-MATCH ROUTINES

  There is a different feeling when you wake up on a matchday. It is not just a weekend thing. Your day is sparkling with promise and purpose, which is too rare. Even if you’re expecting another defeat in a foul season, you still have the consolation of a pre-match routine. Until three o’clock, you are in control. This is your ritual.

  It has probably taken a long time to perfect, and there is perhaps an undercurrent of superstition that any statistical analysis would undermine. Early in the day, clothing might be important. I wore the same boxer shorts to all Middlesbrough home matches between 1995 and 1998, in which time we were promoted twice, relegated once and lost three Cup finals.

  Then the morning must be filled with the matchday habit – a walk to the shop for a paper, a chat with the newsagent about the coming defeat you can feel in your bones (you say this only to absolutely guarantee victory); a bacon sandwich in the usual café, with ketchup falling onto the fixture list you are studying.

  That morning is merely a support act. When noon ticks close, the real day begins. This means taking the usual transport at the usual time ‘into town’. Or, if you’re one of those people I feel disproportionately jealous of, you live within walking distance of your team’s ground and can saunter there like some blessed L. S. Lowry character in modern shoes. Still, though, you’ll use the customary route to the pub. In that pub, the bussed-in, the hand-delivered by train and the Lowry strollers meet. It has to be the normal boozer, even if it isn’t quite the same since that new landlord took over. You probably don’t drink here at times other than matchdays, and so the bar staff and your fellow denizens are fortnightly acquaintances. Not quite friends, but on nodding terms. You will be meeting the usual few – dads, aunties, best mates or football mates, your conversations swaying between poorly children and lone strikers.

  Then the walk to the ground. Same time, same route, same speed. Same programme, fanzine or lotto ticket seller. Same laugh at the odd-looking fella selling pin badges, same story about the time you got food poisoning from that burger van. Same turnstile, same stairway, same shuffle along the seats or to your place on the terrace if you’re lucky in that way, and same hellos to yet more fortnightly pals. Then kick-off comes and you lose control of things.

  This may be very different to your pre-match routine. You may go straight to the ground. You may even watch your team completely sober, making you a stronger person than me. As life changes so do these customs: that gloomy pub is no good for the son you need to bring to games; a concerned medical opinion kiboshes a 2.45pm cheeseburger with onions. Whatever your order of service, there is comfort in known faces and the performing of ritual, and bliss in the thought that football is about so much more than the match.

  10

  THE FIRST DAY OF THE SEASON

  The Friday night can feel like Christmas Eve, the Saturday morning a birthday. All is brand new, a fresh year that smells of mowed grass. The torment of summer is over, purpose is back. The Sunday newspapers are worth reading again.

  Rituals are renewed and even updated. Once more we have somewhere to be. Even if we’re not going to a game, we have our 3pm and 5pm anchors. We can check the team line-ups and listen to the scores, life is stable, the empty chaos of aimless weekends done with. If we are going to the game, we bounce towards the ground like some princess awoken from a coma: ‘Hello, trees . . . hello, birds.’ There are changes, new things, to be spotted – a lick of paint on the main stand beams, a new-look, ‘revamped’ matchday programme, new people to sit near, new signings to be judged. The game starts, and even the misguided innovations of football authorities – foam sprays and their ilk – seem nearly exciting.

  Everything is possible, the canvas blank and ready to be danced across with colour. Last season has faded away, scheduled forgiveness complete. T
he first day of the season is the start of yet another nine-month fling, besotted and full-on for now, but usually petering out beneath the high expectations of Christmas.

  The stadium announcer is as reassuringly irritating as before – some constants are needed. When the teams emerge everything belongs to you again. The colours seem sharper, redder reds and bluer blues. There are special welcomes for those new players who, centre-circle arms aloft, clap back. Your lads dart into their positions, a firework of flesh and intention. The opposition barely exists. Intrusive, real life, the type lived from mid-May to mid-August, has melted away. The referee puts the whistle to his lips and with a roar does this life begin again.

  11

  SLIDE TACKLES IN MUD

  I don’t like perfect football pitches. They are perhaps acceptable in the early days of a season, or for your first ever match, but they detract from the game by lessening the chance of a delightful slide tackle in mud. When the grass is angelic, it irons kinks flat, robbing the play of the unpredictable. There are no strange bounces leading to goals against the run of play, no divots to befuddle a goalkeeper, and, worst of all, no tackles in which a central midfielder goes to ground somewhere near the centre-spot and ends at the centre-circle, his opponent suspended high in the cold air.

  Such challenges can work to an extent on greasy green turf too, but there is something less tangible or satisfying about that, like sunbathing on pebbles rather than sand. Football suits bad weather, and the saintly slide tackle in mud is proof of that.

  This does not come from a desire to see injury. In fact, the second-best slide tackle in mud is followed by the felled player bouncing immediately to his feet and squaring up to the felon, neck veins pulsing. The best is executed perfectly. The tackler must have at least a few yards of a run-up, and all the better if he has bolted across a pitch – oh, and what joy if he is lavishly out of position, a rarely lionhearted winger, perhaps. The theatre is enhanced if – and this is usually the case – he is atoning for an error or unlucky miss. He needs to be side-on to lend the appropriate shadowy air of pickpocketry, the opponent surging forwards unaware that he is prey. When the moment of ambush comes, when the tackler slithers in, it is already too late. Ball is rustled and man tumbles. It could be a solid toe that greets the ball but, when all is right with the weather and the world, a full foot’s worth of leather will thud and thwack. Geographically, the greatest of these treasures is to be found by the touchline, so the passage of play can be killed, and the tackler can jog away grinning inside, his crowd rumbling as loudly as they would for a goal. To complete the piece, his opponent must remain floored. He is knowingly, squarely beaten, and there is even an air of resigned respect in the way he sits and pulls straight his socks.

  Mud is important. It means a winger can’t fly as he might. It means the ball turns more like a cog than a wheel. It means the tackler’s skid has enough distance and speed to create anticipation and animate a crowd. Bring on the patchy pitches of February, I say; they make slide tackles, and slide tackles show that footballers – like us – care.

  12

  WATCHING YOUTH GAMES IN THE PARK

  All through the week, the sacred pitch is buried beneath humdrum deeds. Dogs pelt after tennis balls where the goal-frames should be, and seven-year-old girls make a game of promenading along the faint touchline, paying no attention to the studmarks beneath them. If it’s Monday or Tuesday, there are probably traces of this place’s real purpose – discarded bits of plastic tape by the penalty spot, stiffening orange peel or mud-grids from the bottoms of boots clacked together post-match over the pathway. These are the artefacts of weekend dreaming.

  On a Sunday, however, the occupation ends and such lands as these are returned to their true owners: the weekend lads and lasses who call these neglected fields home. They care so much that they hardly notice sleet or freezing toes. Rigor mortis is worthwhile for the upkeep of an unbeaten run.

  If your timing is right, then the warm-up will be underway. Sometimes this will mean cones, drills and bibs. There is pleasure to be found in watching the seriousness of a tracksuited manager ferociously conducting exercises, some 56-year-old taxi driver who secretly believes that if his team wins enough promotions, then fairytales will happen to him. At other times, it will mean the joyful anarchy of schoolboys acting like a colony of hamsters in a playpen: some welting shots at a shivering goalkeeper; some drudging apathetically through leg stretches; some having a precious last can of Red Bull; some chatting about maths homework or box sets. You may even chance upon a pitch containing only one team. A gang of them will be staring at the empty half beyond, secretly hoping that the opposition isn’t going to show and indulging in a collective eye-roll when they do.

  The referee – a portly sort who can’t believe he is still bothering, or a young officious lad with gelled hair, or a parent pretending to be reluctant – stands by the centre-spot and summons the captains with his whistle. Because he will often be blowing it on a tender morning, it shocks the air and makes crows cringe. The skippers shuffle forward, sometimes with a proper armband from a sports shop, sometimes with a re-purposed bandage, sometimes with nothing other than a cocksure captain’s gait. Tails are called and four-four-twos assembled. Hands as cold and hard as street cobbles at midnight are bashed together and accompanied by screams of ‘COME ON, LADS’, the haka routine of park football.

  Another peep from the referee and the extravaganza begins. Double geography first thing is a lifetime away – play football and seconds stretch, time is chunkier. You are elevated away from all of the usual hormonal terrors of adolescence. Nothing matters but cries of ‘Man On!’ and making triangles. On the sidelines, an angry breed of dads shout, but you don’t hear. You’re in a battle with a niggly lad from that rough estate across town, or you’re trying to keep up with a wily number eight who, rumour has it, is being scouted.

  To watch these distractions and battles is to be treated to a temporary exhibition. As lads and lasses move on and outgrow their boots, it could be that you are watching their last links with their younger, freer selves, selves that innocently thought it possible to be a professional footballer. Savour, then, the sound of headers being undertaken with eyes closed, and of studded herds stampeding over hard grass. Here is rampant escapism, free to watch on a park near you.

  13

  CARRYING ON REGARDLESS

  Midnight has been and gone and the front room is getting cold. I am drifting in and out of sleep on the sofa, intermittently watching television highlights from a round of Europa League games. My eyes close in Monaco and open again in Minsk.

  Some of the teams I have never heard of and have to look up. Most have diacritical marks above letters in their names, which make them feel impossibly foreign: Skënderbeu (Albania), Qarabağ (Azerbaijan) and Plzeň (Czech Republic). It is wondrous to imagine that people in places I have never heard of feel the same as me about football, and have their own delights.

  I am just about awake when the programme magic-carpets me to Thessaloniki, and PAOK versus Borussia Dortmund, black versus yellow, the moon versus the sky. PAOK’s number 11 scurries beyond a full-back and smashes the ball into the net via the crossbar. The power in the noise the home crowd makes seems to shake the television camera. It is an instinctive, boisterous, hedonistic roar. Number 11 hurdles advertisement boards and runs to his crowd. Men climb a fence to show rugged gratitude, beating their chests, mouths wide open and hollering to the stars. Nothing else matters. Then I remember that, if you asked any rational person, it probably should.

  It should matter, they would say, because this is Greece, and Greece, we are told, is collapsing. All is chaos, chaos around the number 11, who is booked for over-exuberant celebrations, and chaos around the fans in orgasmic raptures. Worklessness, empty shelves, emptier cash machines, medicine running low.

  Still, the players toil and conjure with artistic freedom, fans tie scarves around their wrists and light flares. Perhaps football is a distracti
on. Or perhaps the economic and political crumbling of a nation simply does not matter so long as there is football in the world. We supporters have our refuge from anything wretched, vicious reality hurls at us. Inside the stadium, we are protected, and removed from real life. We are the child with her hands over her ears refusing to believe in school.

  All through the years, football has carried on regardless. Wars, revolutions and tragedies, on she rumbles. Even in this country, now, you can attend a game during a national crisis and hear no one talking about it. To us, watching or playing football is a natural thing to do or turn to when all else grows perilous, like a strong leader or a hiding place. The sea could flood most countries into near oblivion, but if we can find a patch of grass and something vaguely round to kick, all will be well. What a warm blanket football is.