Football is a game, games are about winning, winning earns points and ‘points means prizes’. It may sound crude but it is a common view of sport in general, and football in particular. Not just the grim reality of ‘no points if you lose’ but the psychological contradiction sapping all football fans: ‘what exactly is the point of supporting a team which…ermmm…does not win many points?’
That is why we started Turnstile Blues. Ipswich Town was not getting many points; but we still cared, and we could not work out why. For years the team seemed hopeless, the owner was anonymous, the balance sheet was a nightmare (it still is) and overpaid or overblown managers came, went and squandered not just fans’ hard-earned ticket money but the hopes, dreams and traditions of a proud Club. Our Club. And it is ‘our Club’ The Turnstile Blues have argued: because as its lifelong fans Ipswich Town should be held in common for us all, as much as in the name of its creditors, its shareholders or the many professionals who in bleak seasons made lucrative if temporary livings. Mostly, from not playing football quite as well as many of our opponents.
Which is why yesterday for me, was special: not just another Saturday, and not even about winning. OK, our Club beat Nottingham Forest 2-1 to clinch three points and secure the best chance of a Championship Play Off position for the last ten years. Along with 25,000 others at Portman Road, I went berserk at the teasing, spinning and sly arc of Freddie Sears’ 85th minute goal, as it glanced off an opponent’s chest via a North Stand post and clinched a crucial victory. But three other stories coincided yesterday: utterly different but each showing that deep inside football, is a power that can movemasses.
The first story was of David Cameron’s stumble into inauthenticity: the UK’s current Prime Minister could not remember which football team he supported. It was the kind of ‘brain fade’ that in this election’s tight race for the play offs had only previously affected The Greens but which, inexplicably, came over the Blues and left them with faces of Claret. David ‘forgot’ that he was a lifelong supporter of Aston Villa and ‘remembered’ he was a fan of West Ham. Or was it the other way around? Either way Cameron now sounds like a football fraud, to fans of any political colour or none. Given good health, it is utterly impossible for a true football fan ever to forget which team he or she supports.
The second story represents everything that is stronger, cleaner and truer than the above. Chris Reynolds was a lifelong Ipswich Town fan, who was 21 years old when he died on the 19th April 2015. As a tribute and in Chris’s honour his friends organised a ‘minute of applause’ to commence at the 21st minute of yesterday’s game. Tentative at first, the whole ground soon joined in, including the Nottingham Forest fans (thank you). Why? Because football brings people together: literally into one physical space and emotionally into one shared experience. This is something that David Cameron would give even his (probably false) eye teeth to replicate. I don’t know them personally but Chris’s friends stand in the same former terrace, as my friends and me; and Chris loved the same team as everybody else who stands there. Which probably explains why, when Ipswich took the lead in the final seconds of that poignant 21st minute, I have rarely experienced anything like it. To David Cameron and to others who either misunderstand football, or fake that they do understand it, this was just one more round ball passing between two posts, under a bar and into a net. To us it was joy, sadness and community rolled into one.
Rest in Peace Chris Reynolds: and live long the true fans of all colours who yesterday in their millions and in grounds across England, shared a third story: one minute’s silence to recall the horror and mark their grief on the 30th anniversary ofthe fire that killed 56 people at Bradford City’s game against Lincoln.
Football as an ‘industry’ has too often treated its ‘customers’ appallingly, putting fans in avoidable but mortal physical jeopardy as at Bradford or Hillsborough; or in the decades since milking their pockets dry to line the scandalously fat wallets of a minority of owners, managers and players. Some fans have treated other fans appallingly too. I was at Millwall’s old Den, following Ipswich in 1978. As football fans we never want to go there again;and luckily, since they have knocked the place down, we never will. But football is not just a game: it is a cultural and social phenomenon that despite its intense competitiveness and currently shamelesscommercialism, unites more people than it divides. Something which David Cameron, if he ever had been a genuine football fan, would never forget…
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