Letter from London: Hoof and Feint

Commentator: ‘The Premier League season, with all its daft cash and crazy splendour, with all its nifty footwork and gifted stars, has commenced. Let us not forget, ladies and gentlemen, the most goals EVER were scored last season. Football, soccer, is upon us once more…’

I have friends whose eyes glaze over if I enthuse like this. A normally scrupulous Sky News journalist recently suggested most English football fans were members of the far-right, which was suitably and swiftly shouted down. Others, including me, noted that the worst rioting was when there were normally football, or soccer, matches. I was thinking about all this in relation to former MP Mhairi Black who lately decided politics was not for her. Well, maybe politics should not be for football either. With perpetual accusations of sports-washing, and with 115 charges leveled against Man City for alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules, it is not so easy to dismiss.

Besides, Keir Starmer likes football. Ian Birrell has written about the prime minister playing at the same location he plays each week. On the PM’s playing skills, he said he was as ‘an effective organiser and a tenacious player,’ adding, ‘he is solid, hard-working and the sort of competitive character who hates losing that you want on your side.’ Starmer is a die-hard Arsenal fan and regular spectator at the Emirates Stadium who told football monthly FourFourTwo: ‘There’s a group of seven or eight of us who meet in the pub, have a drink and some pre-match banter.’ Maybe it can do some bridge-building after all.

Which doesn’t mean that when I watch on TV with my son the annual Community Shield and first match of the season between Man United and Man City at London’s Wembley Stadium, we don’t cheer like screwballs. (‘Success is not permanent and failure is not fatal,’ as former Man United manager Sir Alex Ferguson once said.) Before the City equaliser, the 1-0 scoreline had not been on the cards at all—surprise had trumped prediction. Nor was this a male thing as football was also soon celebrating the announcement that the 2025 Women’s European Championship is to be shown live on BBC and ITV.

It wasn’t always so friendly. Drake’s Drum was an English-style pub on Second Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan which boasted old-style sawdust and fleets of nauticalia on the walls. It was so named after the snare drum accompanying Sir Francis Drake when he circumnavigated the planet. On his deathbed Drake had the snare drum sent to Devon’s Buckland Abbey, claiming that if the kingdom ever in peril, someone had to beat it. Inevitably, legend now extends to tales of people hearing it beat of its own accord. This is at times of war or significant national trauma. Not unlike the wing-clipped ravens in the Tower of London—I knew a former ravenmaster once—whose continued survival is legendarily central to the survival of the realm.

I took a seat at the copper-topped bar and ordered a Bass Ale. I was at Drake’s Drum because it was the day of the European Cup Final between English club Liverpool and Italian club Juventus at Heysel Stadium in Brussels. Because of the weird time-zone anomaly, the game had already taken place, but none of us knew the score. (It was easy back in 1985 not to know things.) The way it worked was that someone in the Caribbean recorded the game on a VHS tape and flew it over—as a matter of fact, it arrived just as I was ordering my second Bass Ale.

The tape was slipped into the VHS machine. Right before kick-off in Brussels, a large group of Liverpool fans had charged a large group of Juventus fans. We were all watching this play out. A wall or barrier between the two sets of fans was breached. Of those fleeing, 39 fans, mostly Italian, died. Approximately 600 fans, again mostly Italian, were injured. As the death toll grew and grew, it became more and more horrific to watch. Even worse, match authorities decided to play on, when someone should have stopped the whole thing altogether. In fact, the tape should not have been put on the plane, never mind played at the bar, but I guess they must not have known. In the end, I had to leave. I don’t even know if they played the tape to the end. The experience was bad enough for me. Imagine what hell it was for the families.

I’ve been learning a short time ago about the late Nacional-supporting Uruguayan author and poet Eduardo Galeano who first played football as a boy on a dusty melodic Montevideo street. Galeano wanted to go professional but realized he had ‘wooden legs’ and was ‘doomed to be a writer.’ Many South Americans claim his El Futbol a Sol Y Sombra—Football in Sun and Shade—is one of the finest books ever written on the beautiful game. Here he is in translation on an emptying arena: ‘The stadium rests alone and the supporter also returns to his solitude, the ‘me’ who had been ‘us’; the supporter scatters, disperses, is lost, and Sunday is as melancholic as Ash Wednesday after the death of Carnival.’ This love was matched with a love for mankind. He traveled to China and wrote at length about it. In 1966 he bunkered down in Guatemala. In 1971 he published Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which a group of right-wing critics called ‘the idiot’s bible’. In 1973 he lived in exile in Buenos Aires—another great footballing city—after his brief imprisonment by Uruguay’s recently installed military dictatorship at the time. Before he died in 2015, he said: ‘In the Age of the Almighty Computer, drones are the perfect warriors. They kill without remorse, obey without kidding around, and they never reveal the names of their masters.’

Back in London, Frank Skinner is a blithe and sportive man. He has a fetching penchant for fallibility. With the deft David Baddiel and band The Lightning Seeds he wrote the ubiquitous football anthem ‘Three Lions’. As well as reportedly playing the ukelele each day, he remains a firm West Bromwich Albion fan, though he has also reinvented himself as a poetry champion, munching his way through regular podcasts on Elizabeth Bishop, Eliot’s Prufrock, Sasha Dugdale, Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad, Sappho. On football he recently conceded: ‘There is nothing else in life that I could have watched and talked about and read about so much and learnt so little.’ I had friends in Scotland as a boy whose families lived in Africa or the Far East and whose parents would invariably retire back to Scotland, drinking whisky and watching football whenever they could. If you asked about a match, they would smile and say they couldn’t remember.

Commentator: ‘So with one player now down on the ground and injured, I just wanted to remind viewers what the late great former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said, because, fans, it is often misquoted. What he actually said was, and forgive me if I don’t do the Ayrshire accent: ‘Somebody said that ‘football’s a matter of life and death to you’. I said, ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’.’

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