Only A Game
in section Commentary
20 Sep 2001
[comments]
[995w]
My picture today shows Eric Cantona bringing the game of football into repute. Briefly.
Remember? Cantona on his way to the dressing room after a red card. Matthew Simmons, a semiology student and part-time method actor from the university of Gottingen, saw his chance to become an avatar for the spirit of our times. He dashed to the front of the stand and roundly abused Cantona, calling him a 'French bastard' and, as the court reports put it, 'exhorting him to return to his country of origin'. Cantona, himself a noted amateur zeitgeist-surfer, leapt the barrier and booted Simmons in the chest.
Simmons continued to play up well in court. Today we remember the dramatic irony of his assault on the solicitor who had just prosecuted him for public order offences. In my view, however, the subtlest moment in his sustained tour de force was when he gave his occupation as 'double-glazing fitter'. It is by means of double glazing that we look out onto the North Circular without hearing the cars; through double glazing we gaze on the bitter November afternoon without feeling the rain in our marrow. Matthew Simmons must have made his alma mater proud when he brought it into the discourse as a symbol for the Football Sickness.
There are lots of silly things about soccer. It's silly to pay men £50,000 a week to do something they'd do for fun anyway. It's silly that small boys (and their fathers) spend £40 each to wear what amount to advertisers' sandwich boards. It's very silly that cabinet ministers never nail the tendentious question about which football team they support (how one longs for a politician with the gumption to say 'I don't follow soccer'). But there is only one really sick thing about football. The sick thing about football is that we (a euphemism for you / they - if the cap fits, wear it) watch through double glazing.
A man can be a footie fan without (a) playing football or even (b) going to a ground to watch a match. Not just qualify as a fan so he has something to write in the box that asks what team you support; but build a large part of his life around it.
Even visiting the ground is getting pretty vicarious. At least there was something earthy and virile about standing in the sleet for two hours and sharing five urinals between 20,000 blokes. But when the place you go to is like a multiplex, what you watch is going to be a lot like a movie. Indeed, every year more of the ground is made over to hospitality boxes from which one really does watch through double glazing. To my mind the moral merit of going to a match went west when they put seats in the Kop.
Instead footie is, for the most part, an enormous game of Pokémon. It's about collecting things. Not just cards, though they have them for you if you swing that way. There's over-priced merchandise; there are fatuous factoids by the shed load; there are even things which (from their being found in bookshops) I fear we must call 'books'. Above all, the Footémon game is about collecting a series of shared emotions and memories about the season's matches, as they play out in the metaphysical stratosphere, which you can trade to your heart's content in the playground or the boardroom.
And what are these memories and emotions about? Are they about someone you know? Or about a place you have been? Or about a conflict on which the fate of nations hang? No. The players do astonishing things, sans doute. They are fast and clever and balletic. But their speed and wit is theirs It cannot become part of anybody else, no matter how many special poster supplements or cable TV subscriptions he buys.
When Arsenal get a flukey goal in the first ten minutes, then lose a man and defend their delicate lead to full time, they show true doggedness and passion and achieve an authentic triumph. But the grit and the victory cannot be the property of obese men watching on TV in overheated double-glazed sitting rooms. When the fat guys misappropriate these sorrows and joys, they delude themselves. You get crowd aggro because sometimes the fat guys wake up to the emptiness of their experience and go for something that involves consequences - blood and fear in my body, not in a distant image. But the typical experience of soccer fans has as much to do with courage and strength as trainspotting has to do with getting from London to York.
It's a kind of mass stalking. We think stalkers are saddoes who supply the lack of animal spirits in their own hearts by pretending to a share in the passions and hopes of a stranger. But show a soccer fan his own face in that mirror and he takes the extremity of his foolishness as proof that he's serious about it. I don't need to mention the name of the novelist who added this sleight-of-hand to the conceptual toolkit:
(i) I have the following sickness of the heart: eleven men I've never met form the structure of my whole life
(ii) I know I am very ill
(iii) But hey, my soul could only be this sick if it was a pretty big soul to start off with
(iv) So that's alright.
Matthew Simmons is unique among English football fans of the last decade. He alone has experienced something from watching a football match. Not a bogus thrill from someone else's struggle and fear, but his own actual boot in the chest. For the rest of us, footballers stay the other side of the double glazing, where we can attach meanings and feelings to them, love and hate them, and express views about their parentage, without ever being troubled by contact with truth
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