The day after the Serbia vs England match, while sunbathing on my balcony, I espied an interesting vignette taking place on the lawns beneath my apartment block. A little boy was playing football with a man I took to be his father, who looked like a hipster of the kind you can see by the score in Brighton and Hove; goatee, vintage t-shirt, Converse sneakers and a facial expression strongly implying that he’d been to places which made Planet Earth look like a one-horse town.
You’ve got to really love something naturally, in your bones, to hate a song about a robin
The little lad was having the time of his life, kicking the ball at his dad. He was totally living in the moment. The dad? Not so much. In one hand he held a mobile phone which made him a poor goalie. Whenever he stopped the ball, he threw it as far away as he could, so the little lad had to chase it – and every single time this happened, he checked his phone. Every. Single. Time.
I’m not judging. He could have been waiting for some life-changing news – though his relaxed manner indicated otherwise. I think it far more likely that he liked the idea of being a ‘hands-on dad’ who played ‘footie’ with his son. But he wasn’t enjoying it the way that working-class men generally enjoy playing football with their sons, totally getting into it to the extent the kiddie often seems the sensible one. As someone who comes from the English working-class, I’m aware of how much the game has historically meant to men; even my own father, a stoic and sensible communist, couldn’t hear the Leadbelly song ‘Goodnight Irene’ – the anthem of his beloved Bristol Rovers – without getting misty-eyed. And though he very much believed in the brotherhood of man, his eyes would narrow if he was to detect even a few whistled notes of the apparently innocuous ditty ‘When The Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin Along’ which was the song associated with our rivals, Bristol City. You’ve got to really love something naturally, in your bones, to hate a song about a robin.
Somehow, I don’t think that the laid-back dad on the Hove lawn becomes incensed whenever he hears the opening bars of ‘Glad All Over’ – the chosen song of Crystal Palace, who have long conducted a bitter feud with our hometown team the Seagulls. That’s because he’s probably a BBFF: a boho bourgeois footie fan. Such men don’t inherit loyalty to a team, as was always the working-class way, but pick and choose once they’re all grown up; it’s the difference between David Goodhart’s ‘Somewhere’ and ‘Anywhere’ people. As one Bobo living in the capital once put it: ‘Of course I support a London team – Manchester United.’ This flashy team were the choice of that flashiest of writers, Martin Amis, who wrote beautifully about the allegedly beautiful game – and for once with a good amount of self-knowledge – as in this from the London Review of Books in 1981:
Intellectual football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike, who regard our addiction as affected, pseudo-proletarian, even faintly homosexual. We have adapted to this; we keep ourselves to ourselves – oh, how we have to cringe and hide! If I still have your attention, then I assume you must be one of us, pining for social acceptance…
In the early 1990s, a journalist called Nick Hornby – who was writing for my magazine the Modern Review – asked me if I would be interested in reading his unpublished manuscript of a book called Fever Pitch. I read it in one sitting, howling (my second husband commented only half-jokingly that laughing so much at another man’s writing was grounds for divorce) and sighing, because it was – as I subsequently said on the cover of the first print in 1992 – ‘A brilliant book by one of the best writers around – not just a book about football, but a book about love, death and the feather-cut.’ Post-Hornby, it’s been modish for middle-class men to make a life-and-death issue of football – but you have to be extremely talented not to score an own goal on this subject.
In the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine recently, one Sachin Kureishi (an ‘aspring screenwriter’ and relation of Hanif) wrote of neglecting and losing a succession of girlfriends in a piece called ‘This game is my world but it’s ruining my love life’. ‘It was blind loyalty,’ he wrote, ‘a perverted kind of devotion, masochism even…’ is a line that sums up the tone of the piece. But nevertheless there’s a kind of boastfulness about the whole thing, a sense that this strange warping of a personality makes a man, ‘the wildcard to add some thrill to her well-ordered existence’ as he says of his current girlfriend. Again, he is a Londoner supporting Manchester United; another Anywhere man. In the same edition, that ultimate Anywhere posing as a Somewhere in order in re-win the passionately partisan Somewhere of the Red Wall – Keir Starmer – is billed as ‘Father, footie fan… future PM?’ The idea of the ceaselessly shape-shifting, fence-sitting Starmer giving his all on the Arsenal terraces is an odd one; surely he’s tempted to cross to the other side of the pitch when his team seems like losing? ‘Football is my thing; I love it, play it, watch it. We go to the pub and have a bit of banter and walk down to the stadium’ – after which, presumably, the passionate android is plugged back into its charger to be fresh for prime minister’s question time.
Listening to ‘Back Home’ and ‘Three Lions’ side by side, it’s poignant how the former recalls the days before football was colonised by the bourgeoisie
To some extent, I blame Baddiel and Skinner and That Song for the way so many squares who wants to be cool believe that becoming a football fan is the fastest route. Before ‘Three Lions’, your average hipster would rather be seen shaved than listening to a football song like ‘Back Home’, recorded by the England World Cup squad in 1970, and only bought or listened to by working-class people who were touched rather than embarrassed by manly sentiments, such as ‘They’ll see as they’re watching and praying/That we put our hearts in our playing/We’ll fight until the whistle goes/For the folks back home.’ But with ‘Three Lions’, the fashionable floodgates opened and soon everyone from Damien Hirst to New Order was getting in on the act. It’s ludicrous how powerful this rotten song has now become. On the day after the Serbia match, a young woman called a radio show and said cheekily ‘It’s not coming home.’ The presenter was affronted and she was forced to recant before her request was played. I wish Baddiel and Skinner had just done the deed and spared us all those years of homoerotic mimsy – ‘Thirty years of hurt’ indeed. As Q magazine amusingly put it ‘In the future, folk memory will eradicate the memory of David Baddiel’s singing just as effectively as it has eradicated the memory of corpse-robbers during the Blitz.’
Listening to ‘Back Home’ and ‘Three Lions’ side by side, it’s poignant how the former recalls the days before football was colonised by the bourgeoisie. Once it was a safe space for working men to shout and swear, away from their wives and bosses. Now it costs them half a week’s wages to go to the game, possibly sandwiched between their wife and their boss. The newcomers were offended by aspects of a sporting culture that wasn’t theirs – partly not understanding the difference between uncouth banter and actual hatred – and promptly used their position to remake it to suit them. This has rendered the atmosphere around the game pretentious and censorious, as seen in everything from plaster saints like Gandhi Lineker pontificating about Gaza to the Monaco FC Mohamed Camara being suspended for daring to cover up an LGBT support badge on his jersey recently – the latest of several Muslim players in Europe to run into trouble for not bending the knee to fashionable ideas about queerness. Most shamefully of all, Newcastle United banned lifelong fan Linzi Smith from attending home matches for expressing sex-realist views online. In 2022 the Premier League admitted that it had carried out hundreds of similar investigations – online prying and monitoring – after complaints about people who dare to think differently from the modish herd.
The prevailing disappointment with the performance of the England team is partly a product of how far the game has strayed from its working-class roots. John Sturgis wrote here last week about the new preciousness which led vice-captain Kyle Walker to say of critical fan feedback ‘The media like to build up a storm and put thoughts in your head that probably shouldn’t be there.’ That and the fact that the players didn’t really act like they were playing for England, but for their own individual Premier League clubs; they were playing for Anywhere that paid them the most – not Somewhere that their heart and soul was. I wonder if that Hove hipster will still be interested in a kickabout with his little boy when England have been sent packing, as they inevitably soon will – or will he be off looking for another slice of working-class culture to make him feel more real?
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