Saturday 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football Read online

  14

  BELONGING

  It brings contentedness unexpectedly. There I am, waiting for a bus when it swarms over me. I become aware that, no matter what happens in the many departments of life, I belong. If all else goes awry, I will still have a football club, and it will still have me.

  This must be how the religiously convinced feel. It is a faith, matchdays a service for the congregation. Clubs are omnipotent, carried in your heart on weekdays, holidays and during the dreaded summer interval. It is something to define yourself by, like an extra part of your name or your accent.

  Belonging seeps into your moods. It is obvious how this is so after a win, loss or draw. Many times have I been accused of being distant, or even deep, when actually the football part of me is hurting after an unexpected home loss. On other days, the chiding of low crowd figures in a newspaper article can see afternoons lost to anger, as if a beloved auntie has been slandered. Conversely, wrapping oneself in cosy thoughts of yesteryear goals means transformative warmth. If you belong then dull hours can be lit and tedium suspended without a ball having been kicked. I’ve filled screeds of free hotel notepads with best elevens and lists of every Middlesbrough right-back I’ve seen, animating the dreariest of conferences.

  Aside from those moments of connection at funerals or in faraway pubs when you meet a fellow traveller with the same attachment as yours, all of this is lived alone. It is, perhaps, what makes going to the match with thousands of your comrades so profound. As you stream towards the ground, in every step there is unity among weekday aliens. You may be completely incompatible with them elsewhere, but here you march together bonded by colours. Players, managers, owners just drop by – this is your club, jointly cultivated by 30,000 hearts. ‘Remember the wisdom of the ages,’ says the Singer at the end of Caucasian Chalk Circle, ‘that everything belongs, by right, to those who care for it.’

  Not always do you agree on team selections or set-piece takers, but when you share roots like this, there is more to unite than divide. You sing together with strangers, unthinkable elsewhere, and clutch them clumsily after scoring. Stand and take a look around: this belonging crosses class, age, gender and racial divides. What a delight it is never to be truly alone.

  15

  FAT PLAYERS

  This is not in a derogatory sense. It is a salute to the kind of player who has slipped from the mainstream but can be found haunting lower divisions, usually in centre-midfield. He is no more corpulent than most of the crowd barracking him. He possesses the early suggestions of a plentiful belly, primed to one day gloop over the waistline of his shorts, but he is far from obese. Make him put on a football kit and play in front of a paying crowd, though, and he mutates into a jogging bear. Everything is ‘Who Ate All the Pies?’ and, ‘He’s got bigger knockers than our lass.’ But boy can he play.

  The barrackers realise first when a ball thunders towards him and he stuns it dead. Then there are the passes. He sprays and spatters them about, giving wingers fuel and forwards hope. Some float for 50 yards, others spin to a full-back rolling forward unseen by anyone else. When he gallops over to take corners, his chest palpitating, they shout abuse but they judge admiringly. If he is near enough to goal during the time of an attack, then mercy to the goalkeeper whose hands are burned by the embers of his pile-driver.

  Could he have played higher up the game had the paunch not always gone before him? Perhaps. Yet there is cheer in the way his normal physique – mirroring that of the supporters – kept him theirs to savour.

  16

  JEERING PASSES THAT GO OUT OF PLAY

  So many good things about football are doused in schadenfreude. Rivals losing, opponents being sent off, players you particularly loathe being arrested for nightclub incidents. As distasteful to normal human beings as this is, it does add another rich crust to the supporting life. Imagine instead that we indulged in the opposite to schadenfreude, ‘mudita’ – deriving happiness from others’ wellbeing. We would applaud our city rivals when they won the league and be happy for a club suddenly caked in Middle Eastern or Russian money. What a sickly, grey world. It would deduct from the experience of following a team, dampen a healthy human fire. Think how few great love songs there would be if cuckolded men smiled and shook the hands of their conquerors.

  Jeering passes that go out of play is a small but important example of this. It does not bring the euphoria of celebrating a goal, instead it breeds a tickled smugness. If it happens very early in a match that matters, it can be read as a sign that this will be your day. This is so much better if the perpetrator is a star centre-forward. With his back to goal and a centre-half sniffing, he attempts to play the ball out to his winger. It rolls straight out of play for a throw-in. The attacker blames someone else, but already the jeer is ringing. It is very often an ‘aaarrrggghhh’ noise which, performed in unison, throws up the soundtrack of stocks day in a medieval Somerset village. Some supporters will even stand to exhibit their glee more fully, one or two arms aloft, hand signals clear.

  There are other variations. A wild shot which ends up going out for a throw pleases; a goalkeeper’s scuffed kick from a pass-back too. What a happily horrible lot we are.

  17

  CATERING VANS

  Every Saturday, and on those sainted weeknights when there is a match, a fleeting community settles outside our football grounds. They bring with them temporary street furniture, and disappear shortly after the game has ended, a circus leaving town. There are decorating tables repurposed as scarf stalls, with pin-boards propped behind them. ‘Get your hats and scarves, hats and scarves here,’ barks a man. He often has a non-local accent and unruly facial hair, and always a money belt. The pin-badge purveyor has one too, and awkwardly bears a hat promoting his wares. Both occasionally jog on the spot to keep warm. The lotto seller has nothing but her bright jacket and fingerless gloves, the programme boy or girl a tin rectangular block to hide behind and a margarine tub of change to rifle through. There might be the odd ‘promo girl’ handing out flyers for a club night or a quick loan. The road behind her is tiled with her leaflets, discarded by hoards striving to think of nothing but wins and points. Three or four volunteers unused to football crowds rattle charity buckets half-full of clinking copper and nickel. Flanking all of this like smouldering sentry tanks are the catering vans.

  Rarely brand new, these wagons are called things like ‘Sizzle Spot’, ‘All Star Grill’ and ‘USA Burger’, those names displayed in bright typefaces rarely seen away from seaside towns. A secondary line – sometimes in different lettering again – will tell you that they serve ‘1/4 Pounders Jumbo Hot Dogs Cheeseburgers’ at the very least, and possibly even ‘Chips’ or ‘Bacon Rolls’. While the scarf, programme and lotto mongers provide a soundtrack, the vans award the football air its scent. Fried onions never smell this good – this poignant – anywhere else. Memories are entangled in the odour.

  Getting close to the vans, you will hear that they make noise too. Generators whir, meat sizzles, men who should know better agree to double their burger, their faces suddenly back in the school canteen line nicking chips. Seeing these crackling wagons, whether from afar or from the queue, adds to a sense of occasion. They are not usually there. Something is happening that doesn’t happen every day, and that something is football. If this is indeed a night match, then the egg-yolk glow of the van’s serving hatch brings theatre.

  I wonder sometimes about the people who work in the vans. Do they prefer the football to the car boot sale or the village carnival? These businesses are usually staffed by one older and one younger person, who I always presume to be family. It is a pleasantly long way from a teal truck where hipsters sell Japanese dumplings for a fiver each. May the burgers of the Snack Shack stay bulk-bought, the cheese from Licensed to Grill sweaty and orange. Biting into a slightly crispy patty that has been piled up since one o’clock says ‘football’ where ‘hand-pulled pork’ does not.

  Catering vans matter because they a
re a part of the ritual and the temporary circus. They colour the air with evocative scents, adding another, beguiling texture to our football world.

  18

  GOING WITH DAD

  It catches me by the throat. I am walking to a game and I see their outlines. A dad and his son, going to the match. Sometimes Grandad is there, holding the line. Son wears the shirt, Dad his weekend jeans, Grandad something sensible and dark green. Of course, there are variations on this – mums and sons, dads and daughters – which are to be cherished. But father and son is what I have lived, and so it is this which brings me such particular delight.

  Like a million boys and girls before me, I probably wasn’t included in the attendance figure for my first ever game. It was the late 1980s and I was lifted over the turnstile and into the ground. It feels too recent for that practice to have still been rolling on, a pixel of black and white in an HD world. It was the grotty tail-end of ‘old football’, with all its ambrosia and poison. I am pleased to have known it, but then I remember that first flash of lime turf rather than urine trickling down terraces and Sergio Tacchini on the rampage. My dad did the lifting and for the first time we watched a football match, me roosted upon an iron-red crash barrier. Nowadays, there are seats beneath us, but we still go together. We are too far gone to take up another pastime, embedded in this pleasant paternal rut.

  Going with your dad means access to a source of calm and cynicism. We are one-nil down and I am edgy. They hit a post. ‘Turning point, that,’ says Dad, ‘we’ll be fine.’ We are one-nil up and I am ecstatic. They hit a post. ‘It’s coming, this bloody equaliser.’ Dads don’t always sing along, nor go quite as berserk as you after a goal. They offer the solidity of wisdom, having seen more games and shaken their heads at more players than you. At football, dads are buoyancy aids.

  Football offers fathers and sons something to do together. It is a strange way of saying ‘I love you’, but a way of saying it nonetheless.

  19

  JIMMY ARMFIELD’S VOICE

  Sometimes when Jimmy Armfield isn’t speaking, I swear I can hear him smile. The radio commentator will have described a fine passage of play, and I just know that Jimmy is there, sitting back, arms folded, still enraptured by the game.

  His voice is a blessing not only because it helps us float happily to sepia days, but also because it conveys his continuing adoration of football. For all its distortions, when 22 men crowd around a ball it’s clear not that much has shifted and football remains a happy distraction.

  This wouldn’t work in any old voice. While the content of Jimmy’s words is in itself rich, delivery is key. His regular tone is soft but serious, a measured grandad explaining why stealing is wrong. Volume rises to express annoyance at a cynical foul or glee at a wave of attacking play from a team chasing a goal. When this happens, Jimmy’s voice begins as peppered rifle fire and ends with a grenade, launched after a short pause in the form of a word like ‘disgrace’ or ‘wonderful’.

  Proclamations like those are helped by a homely Lancastrian accent which throws a cloth cap upon each word as it ascends from the radio speaker. It is reassuring, a handshake between England’s old and new. Set against the jarring platitudes and rent-a-voices of other pundits, Jimmy is a nice cup of tea when all around us is Blue WKD. His is a burring brogue which resonates with depth and honesty, where so much else now is sensation and surface.

  When I hear Jimmy Armfield’s voice I feel like I am listening in on an impromptu love letter to the game. He may only be describing a dubious offside decision, but it comes from such a tender place that I can’t help but be moved. Armfield remains bewitched and besotted after a lifetime of football: there is hope for us all.

  20

  HEADERS

  There are towering defensive headers that make the crowd feel safe, and knock-downs from the big man up front. There are near-post flicks, unmet headers across goal, and point-blank blocks, looping headers and diving ones, rarest of the rare though they now are.

  Headers won in shirty tussles, neck muscles pulsating, are Herculean duels. The headed own goal is an art form in itself, especially when accompanied by the cruel ritual charade of the victim lifting his hands to his head, turning to face the halfway line and swearing aggressively and yet forlornly. As he has shown, precision is often found hiding. Headers are another element of the wonderful mess that this game is. They can jolt in any direction, spin and twist dangerously or gloriously if misjudged, bringing gleeful whoops of ‘Fifty-pence-piece ’ead!’ from the occasional spectator.

  But the well-timed run to meet cross or corner and thud the ball into the net receives a special kind of roar. Those players who make this a specialism, those who can ‘hang in the air’, occasion misty-eyed looks of reverence. Supporters become sentimental onlookers observing a craftsman at work.

  Oddly, it seems to me that a header is often scored when a team is two or three goals down. The scorer stalks the ball into the net, retrieves it – if you’re lucky there is a barney with an unyielding goalkeeper as he does so – and bombs back to the halfway line. Somehow, that the ball has been headed douses the goal in more hope than if it had come from a one-on-one or hooked shot. The ball is dreamed into the net.

  Few manoeuvres in the game are as durable as heading the ball. It represents both the clumsier and more basic side of football and the majestic, with the same result. To hear the thwack of a park-player’s forehead on a size-five ball quickens the heart; to watch a nuanced flicked header by a world star flummox the goalkeeper does the same. To rise and win the challenge, to glance a header goalwards – all of it lifts any match.

  21

  FLOODLIGHTS

  They are merely lamps in the sky, and yet they turn football into a fairytale. Floodlights say ‘once upon a time’ and sprinkle upon their surroundings an otherworldly sheen. Walking towards them on some winter Tuesday night puts you under a spell, renders you as simple as a moth, calls you to prayer. They are the light at the end of a tunnel.

  Floodlights transform everyday streets into something else altogether. They fling an ivory shroud of reflection across tiles and bricks, making Victorian terraces into film sets. All fulgent roads lead to the ground, that neon alien ship to which we swarm like 20,000 ETs going home. Roll up, roll up, for here is glamour, showbiz, theatre and, tonight, whoever the team and whatever its fortunes, this is the only ticket in town.

  If that outer-ground pageant no longer survives everywhere, then what happens next does. You push the turnstile and soon the radiant green of the pitch tickles your eyes. In comparison to a match in daylight, senses are heightened. The crowd seems louder, the air closer, burger stands more fragrant. It can even happen in daytime, once the clocks have gone back – a Saturday 3pm game that kicks off as a bright autumn day and ends under floodlights, groggily turned on midway through the second half like last year’s Christmas tree bulbs. On those days do you realise that the season has really begun, that the league table may not be lying. No season is fully alive until you have glanced upwards and watched arrows of electrified rain darting through a floodlight’s glow.

  It is obvious to say that the greatest floodlights are of the classical type. Four pillars marking each corner: concrete plinths, iron pylons and a rectangle of a dozen or so bulbs. When observed on a town’s landscape, it is this kind of floodlight that can make you sigh happily, and this kind of floodlight which may be used instead of a map to locate a ground new to you. Yet all types have charm and pull. I have a particular fondness for lights attached to the roofs of stands, which remind me of the lamps on miners’ helmets. They also fail more dramatically, almost in sequence, on the rare occasions that that now happens (standard required response: ‘Someone’s forgotten to put 50p in the meter.’).

  It seems a shame, however, to even approach being technical or specific about floodlights. Their genius is in the crackle they create, the sense of expectation they rouse. Football under the lights. Evocative words of magic and wonder,
like ‘Christmas Eve’ and ‘seaside town’.

  22

  TALKING TO AN OLD MAN ABOUT FOOTBALL

  He could be a relative or a family friend, or perhaps a stranger in a pub. He finds out that you are under football’s spell and launches the time machine in his head. Backwards it reels, the nineteen-eighties, seventies and sixties . . . mere leaves in the wind. It settles in a place not quite recognisable as a fixed, defined decade or period, more a black and white country of long baggy shorts and crowds of 50,000 people in hats. Look hard enough into his eyes, and you can go with him.

  Those old eyes, often saddened by the ailments of ageing and the passing of friends, sparkle. His younger self fights its way to the fore, the irises a portal for a version of him presumed gone. A deep, definite smile washes his face clean of worry and creases, rosy cheeks climbing as he speaks. There are slow, wistful tilts and tics of the head, each shaking free a memory. He takes you to see his heroes, his finest afternoons and his favourite places.

  You are with him up the crumbling steps and in his father’s arms as he is bundled into the ground. You see the same blazing green beyond a society of bobbing heads, and jostle your way down to the front to stand on a lemonade crate. You quiver every time the crowd surges, totter onto the cinder by the pitch after a goal.

  Strain hard enough, and you can see the great sides winning week after week, the record victories, the games in snow, savage tackles, heavy laced balls that hardly bounce, Christmas derby matches, gentleman players with side-partings, brown boots that safeguard ankles, goalkeepers without gloves or fear, wizard dribblers and half-backs who can kick a ball to Saturn. This memory game is made of such otherworldly legends. The old man tells you of ‘characters’, those purveyors of derring-do and escapade. At various times, I have been treated to an Alloa centre-forward who rounded a goalkeeper and asked the crowd where in the net they wished to see the ball dispatched, a Barnsley midfielder who would hop over the heads of full-backs, and a Raith Rovers winger so quick he could head his own crosses.