The European Super League could never have been real football

Posted on 21st April 2021 by Ian

Football has always been a matter of faith of dreams. In a world of franchises, in a hard-nosed, material age, there are still people who are prepared to commit significant parts of their lives and incomes to following a team who will never win major honours and give their supporters bragging rights in the pub, yet there is always the hope that one day a moment will come.

The English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote:

“. . .  It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith”

Football supporters have an irrational fondness for the characters they follow on the pitch week by week. By the standards of those at the top level, where a single player may earn as much in a month as a lower league club might pay its entire staff in a season, the players they may follow may be mediocre mid-table journeymen, whose prospect of ever playing on the international stage are very remote, yet they will be invested with extraordinary talent and aspiration by the supporters of the club.

Given the dominance of soccer by a handful of big clubs, and a realisation that the majority of clubs have no prospect of winning anything, being a football supporter seems to accord with Coleridge’s ideas concerning the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

What else other than a willing suspension of disbelief would prompt tens of thousands of people each week to attend matches involving clubs whose prospects of silverware are minimal, clubs for whom avoiding relegation is deemed a success. The triumph of Leicester City in 2016, though, is the exception that proves the rule, the exception that gives hope to others. Of course, after one season of variation, the handful of clubs who have dominated English soccer  re-established their dominance, but Leicester showed they were fallible.

There are grounds that are full every Saturday, there are others where the empty seats are plentiful. It demands an act of faith to commit oneself to following a club who will almost certainly never be triumphant at the top level and but there are many people who are still willing to make such a commitment.  Among those whose diet of football comes through a satellite dish, among those who might have watched the broadcast matches of the European Super League, how many have any conception of what real football is like?

Coleridge talked about “poetic faith.”  The clubs who would never have been considered for the franchise football are teams that inspire a poetic response among supporters. Such clubs offer community, identity, tradition, a sense of place, personal engagement, shared joys and sorrows, moments that are local and personal, moments that could never be experienced through a satellite dish.

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Sunday cricket and other activities

Posted on 20th April 2021 by Ian

Today marks the ninetieth anniversary of the Act of Parliament that allowed sports to be played in England on a Sunday. The legislation was one of the moves away from the Sabbatarian spirit that had shaped English laws. Ninety years later, the legacy of that spirit still lingers in the restrictions on the Sunday opening hours of shops.

Perhaps the laws were meant to help make people religious, if so they failed entirely. (Oddly, Ireland has never had such restrictions and remains one of the more religious countries in Europe, people did not need to be barred from shopping to make them attend Mass). Perhaps any piece of legislation that restricted people’s freedom was more likely to inspire resentment than reverence. Perhaps the English were too far gone from religion to be prompted to go to church because there was little else to do.

The words of Mr Keach come to mind when hearing of such anniversaries. Mr Keach is the prickly vicar in JL Carr’s beautiful novella A Month in the Country. The story is set in the post-Great War period. Mr Keach knows it was not wise to be  overly religious when he confronts Tom Birkin, the narrator of the story.

It is the summer of 1920 and Birkin’s mind is filled with the hideous images of the Western Front, images that have driven out any last vestiges of traditional religion. But perhaps it was not just the Great War that destroyed the church in England, perhaps the English with a tradition of rationalism and free thought, had little time for traditional religion. Keach certainly thinks so:

The English are not a deeply religious people. Even many of those who attend divine service do so from habit. Their acceptance of the sacrament is perfunctory: I have yet to meet the man whose hair rose at the nape of his neck because he was about to taste the blood of his dying Lord. Even when they visit their church in large numbers, at Harvest Thanksgiving or the Christmas Midnight Mass, it is no more than a pagan salute to the passing seasons. They do not need me. I come in useful at baptisms, weddings, funerals. Chiefly funerals – they employ me as a removal contractor to see them safely flitted into their last house.’ He laughed bitterly.

‘But I am embarrassing you, Mr Birkin,’ he said. ‘You too have no need for me. You have come back from a place where you have seen things beyond belief, things which you cannot talk of yet can’t forget, but things which are at the heart of religion. Even so, when I have approached you during your stay here, you have agreed that it is very pleasant weather for this time of year, you have nodded your head and said that your work is progressing well and that you are quite comfortable in the loft. And you have hoped that I shall go away.’

Mr Keach might almost have been relieved when Parliament allowed people to attend sport on a Sunday.

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Friends, not foreigners

Posted on 19th April 2021 by Ian

It was on this day in 1984 that Australia adopted Advance, Australia fair as its national anthem. Until that day God save the Queen had been the anthem. It must have been strange for people from Britain to travel to the other side of the world and hear their own anthem as the local anthem. Australia would have seemed a place that was not home, but not foreign, either.

I remember a moment of feeling far from home but not in a foreign place when standing outside of a phone box on the edge of English Bay in Vancouver in 1998. It was a first visit  to Canada in 1998. There were eight hours of time difference from home, thousands of miles of flying. It was not home, but then, neither was it in any way alien. The Canadians speak better English than the English; Queen Elizabeth’s head was on all the coins; everything was familiar and friendly; it was a good place to be.

It was strangely reassuring to feel at home so far away.

I remember a similar feeling as I passed a morning watching the Australian general election results in 2007. Eleven hours ahead, and on the other side of the world, it could have been the BBC in London.

It wasn’t just the format that had a familiar feel, it was the people who presented and the people who appeared. In a world markedly different from, or even hostile to, the old and the familiar things of these islands, there was a sense that here were friends. No matter how much I might have disagreed with Prime Minister Howard’s support of the Iraq war, or his treatment of immigrants, I always thought he would be a good guy to have at your table at dinner, or to have a pint with, or to invite to a barbecue. These people were people you would understand and who would understand you.

The voice of Kerry O’Brien, the presenter  created a sense that timeless traditions were being upheld and that there was still a world where the best of the old Western values had a place. As they rolled through the constituency names, there was a poetic mingling of the Old World and the New World, of the reassuringly usual with the interestingly exotic, but there was never a sense of any of it being foreign.

Reflecting on the thoughts of being far from home, but not alien, I’m reminded of the story of the London cabbie with a pair of backpackers in his taxi who him whether the place they were going would welcome foreigners. “Blimey mate,” the cabbie replied, “you’re not foreigners, you’re Australians.”

Advance, Australia fair.

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One dram below par

Posted on 18th April 2021 by Ian

Pondering the return to a school burdened by Covid restrictions, the return to wearing a mask and rushing through corridors between lessons because Years 7 and 8 are expected to pass their days confined in single classrooms, to continuing to implement the many measures expected by the government, there is a heavy heart, a feeling of being below par.

Reflecting on feeling recalled the use of the term “below par” in Compton McKenzie’s Whisky Galore. “It is a well known medical fact that some men are born at least one dram below par,” says Dr McClaren of the schoolmaster George Campbell in the 1949 film version of the book. The schoolmaster is a man who has lived his life in fear of a domineering mother, particularly in fear of her disapproval of intoxicating liquor.

In the story, the shipwreck of a freighter carrying 50,000 cases of whisky on the tiny Hebridean island on which they live, at a time during the Second World War when the whisky supplies have run out, provides an opportunity for Campbell to break free from maternal domination, and it brings a change in the attitude of his mother.

It is a light hearted comedy, but the point made by McClaren, played by James Robertson Justice who would go on to play various medical roles in films, is a serious one. The adjustment of the chemical balance in our brains has the capacity to make us different people. In the 1940s, when the film was made, psychiatry was still at the point where hospitals were carrying out damaging brain surgery in the hope of addressing mental health problems; lobotomies were performed as being thought the least worst way of dealing with difficult patients.

Dr McClaren tells us something that was known for centuries: change the chemistry and you change the person, or you at least change them temporarily. The schoolmaster Campbell becomes a lively outgoing person after partaking of whisky saved from the wreck, but when the effects of the alcohol wear off, would he not return to being the same George Campbell he always was?

Similarly, doesn’t the medication used in mental health have only a temporary effect? If the use of the medication is interrupted, don’t people revert to their former selves?

Having had bouts of depression since childhood years, there has always been the temptation to go to the doctor and ask for a prescription for something that might provide a “lift,” a temptation to say to the doctor that ordinarily I am “at least one dram below par” and that a suitable corrective would be welcome. But does one end up being something other than oneself? A friend talks of there being a uniform flatness when he takes the medication that he is prescribed, that the deep troughs into which he might sink are avoided; he also talks about there being what he calls a “greyness.”

Isn’t it better to be George Campbell as himself? There are days that are below par, but there are other days as well.

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The last enemy

Posted on 17th April 2021 by Ian

There was a BBC camera shot of the Queen at the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh that seemed a gross intrusion. The director and cameraman could have had no conception of the pain that was being felt, no understanding of the emotions that may have been experienced at that moment.

No matter at what age it comes, death always brings grief.

Fifty years ago, at the time of decimalisation in Britain in early 1971, there was reportedly a lady who told a reporter that she didn’t mind the idea of the decimal money, but that she thought that the Government might have waited for the old people to die before they brought the new money in. Everyone laughed when the story was told. Sometimes, though, there seems to be a sort of sense in what she was saying. Sometimes it seems that it would be a whole lot easier if things could be put off for just a while.

During my years of parochial ministry, if I had been asked for what I would wish if I could wish for anything, I would have asked for a moratorium on people dying, at least on my patch, so that I could get through to retirement without having to stand wordless as another family lost a loved one.

I hate death. I hate all the euphemisms we use for it. I hate watching the grief and the pain. I hate the emptiness that is still there years afterwards.

It would be a nonsense to suggest that Christians are meant to be reconciled to death. Saint Francis, whatever else he may have got right, got it wrong when he spoke of our “Sister Death.” The Bible never uses such benign terms about something so dark. Saint Paul is quite clear about where we stand. He writes in 1 Corinthians 15:26, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” No sisterly regard from that apostle, no ambiguity, death is an enemy that is to be destroyed. There was no mistaking what Saint Paul says. There was no mistaking what Saint Peter says either. The dead were trapped in Hades and Jesus goes to preach to them in order that they might have a chance of escape. The idea that death was a sister would have sounded strange and alien to the Jewish ears of Peter: death was an end, a negation of life.

Perhaps the BBC television crew were unmoved at the death of a ninety-nine year old man, perhaps they would have argued that the camera shots of the Queen were in the public interest. Perhaps it is only the experience of grief that persuades people that death is an enemy.

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