14. There's Something Soothing About Football

... being a meditation on the significance of the national game from a bloke who was always the last to be picked in P.E.

I was never any good at football. But I can still remember scoring that goal, in the last year of primary school, when some keen teacher organised a tournament for four teams of us nine year olds - or whatever we were. I was in Brown’s Bombers. Malcolm “Mally” Brown was the captain, and Robert Capell was the goalie on the other side who I shot past, watching his right arm and leg stretch out to leave a gap wide enough the ball to sail satisfyingly through. I don’t think that I have ever scored a goal since. Not one that has etched itself so indelibly into my memory anyway.

I can’t remember the final score in the game, or the result of the tournament, or any of the other players involved. But I can still recall the joy of watching that goal going in. It was the climax of my career. From there on, it was all downhill. As I progressed through middle, and secondary school, the other kids got keener on football, and more proficient at it. I remained at the level I had attained at primary school which, that goal notwithstanding, wasn’t all that good anyway. I was always the last to be picked in P.E. sessions. The kids who had been nominated as captains would negotiate about who would suffer the handicap of having me on their team, sometimes even offering a better player along with me, to soften the blow.

Under the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising that grew to dislike P.E. When we went to the playing fields for a session, me and another lad used to ask if we could just practice our running, then run to the far side, well out of sight, where we would sit on the grass, make daisy chains, and talk nonsense. The teachers probably knew, but it saved their game from being spoiled anyway.

Even though I wasn’t very good at it, I didn’t dislike football. My Dad used to take me to See Hull City now and then, when he got a Saturday off, which wasn’t often because he worked in a town centre shop, repairing watches. He also used to let me fill in his pools coupon with him, and when we couldn’t go to a game he would ask me to check the classified results for him before he got home from work. Len Martin’s voice reading out the scores division by division on Grandstand was a part of the atmosphere of Saturday teatime as much as Kent Walton’s was when he commentated on the wrestling on World of Sport on Saturday dinnertime.

For a lot of people, the classified results were a major part of the football experience. There was a real outcry a couple of years ago when the BBC dropped them from the radio to allow for the build up to half past five matches. The greatest ever reader of the classifieds, James Alexander Gordon¹ read the results on the radio from 1974 until a year before his death in 2014. His voice was so iconic that it has recently inspired someone to recreate it using Artificial Intelligence, so that you can still hear him reading out the scores today.

For me, the classified results are as iconic as the shipping forecast. Both summon up an aspect of British life that will never go away². There will always be the need for sailors to have visibility reports, wind speed and a general synopsis of conditions at sea, even if you never set sail, let alone go to Rockall, Malin Head or Finisterre (sadly, now called FitzRoy). There will also always be the need to report on the results of football matches, even if you never go to a match, let alone care about the fortunes of Heart Of Midlothian, Accrington Stanley or Bournemouth & Boscombe Athletic (sadly, now called AFC Bournemouth). Whether you have a personal stake in the information or not, you can still be mesmerised by both of these, the hypnotic poetry of the delivery, the ebb and flow, and the way that they soothingly speak of life going on in the far flung corners of Britain, with people working and taking their leisure as they have done for years in the past and will continue to do so years into the future, even when you are no longer around.³

Well, thats how it feels to me anyway. When I wrote the poem below, I wanted to show that feeling of the timelessness of football that I got from listening to the results. I suppose that it is still possible to still get that feeling from Sky Sports and Match of the Day, but modern football is much more obsessed with the top teams, not celebrating much more history than happened since the Premier League was founded in 1992. Other than the occasional footage of the 1966 world Cup final, football seldom presents itself in that wider context going back to the late victorian period, not even back to the period of early radio or even the time of James Alexander Gordon.

Admittedly, the Premier League has brought a lot of advantages to the game, but the sense of its greater structure has been lost when the results of Gillingham and Colchester United are seldom presented in the same context as the results of West Ham and Manchester United, and the gap in financial clout between the very top and the divisions below just perpetuates itself.

As well as putting the football in the wider context of past and present, I also wanted to show the modern game with its superclubs as being somehow inconsequential, and removed from the real world. It is a leisure activity. Some people - the die hard fans, may still follow it as they would a religion, but for most it is just a game, background colour, a respite for most of us from the cares of the world, the problems in our personal lives and the problems in the political sphere.

I can watch a football match on the television in the same way as I can listen to music, emotionally engaged, yet free of all other cares. Its the same with going to see a match or a musical performance. It engages in a way that masks all other concerns for a couple of hours.

In that sense, I really do think that there’s something sooting about Football. Apart from when Hull City lose to Sheffield Wednesday as a new year dawns and hope begins to fade once more.

There’s Something Soothing About Football

There’s something soothing about football
Arsenal will always be playing Tottenham
And it will always be a home win, away win or draw
In the league
In the cup
In a friendly

There will always be injuries
Sending offs, 
Transfers
Discord in the dressing room
The minnows and the sleeping giants
The tiddlers and the titans
Whatever.

You can always blame the ref.

Not like the real news
Where people get hurt,
Wasted,
Disregarded by the machinations of politicians 
Where lives are ruined
People are thrown into prison, 
Poverty, 
Destitution
And it could be you next
You can feel it, 
Just a hairs breadth away

No, 

There's something soothing about football
Where Manchester City will always be playing Manchester United 
Where even a career ending injury 
Is cushioned by a good pension
Often supplemented by a good income from TV punditry, 
A book deal, or after dinner speeches and appearance fees 

There’s something soothing about football
Where Chelsea will always be playing Liverpool
And the worst that can happen 
Is that the man who could have won it is not selected
Or left on the bench
Or removed from the pitch in a meaningless substitution

You can always blame the manager
You can even sack the manager
It wouldn’t really matter to him 
Sack him or not, 
It wouldn’t really matter to you 

It’s not as though his ideology will leave anyone homeless and hungry
Unable to look after their kids
Desperate to the point of ending it all
Wanting to blow the final whistle on the whole miserable affair

You can’t blow the final whistle on football
Football will go on forever
There’s something soothing about football

For a different take on the meaning of football, have a read of Tracy Dawson’s poem Grassroots on her Sixty Odd Poets page.

Further I have also mentioned the contrast between football then nd now in my Housman tribute poem Is My Team still Ploughing?

1. I have heard that back in the early 1970s, before he found his forte as the voice of the classifieds, James Alexander Gordon did radio interviews of newsworthy people. One time he recorded an interview Jimi Hendrix, before it started they chatted together in the green room - so that they could get to feel relaxed in each other’s company. Apparently, Jimi wanted to get particularly relaxed, and asked his host “Do you smoke shit, man?” James Alexander replied “No, I smoke Condor, actually”

2. Both are also associated with memorable theme tunes, the Shipping Forecast with Sailing By, and the BBC Radio classified football results with Out of the Blue.

3. Here’s a classified pools check from March 1987