Fixture release day is the footballing highlight of the summer. Even those fans for whom relegation was the paltry reward for another season of dedicated service will at least have something new to look forward to. It might not be a cash-laden consortium of far east owners, or a precocious young coach, or a new star striker, but there will at least be a couple of different teams on the fixture list. If your team finished mid-table in one of the middle divisions then you will have a few new faces. They might include a Goliath on their way down, a David on their way up, or perhaps just a once familiar foe that has spent a few seasons in either the sun or the shadows. From the moment the preceding season has finished and matters of promotion and relegation have been settled I will have had my eye on new grounds to visit.
I put every game in my work calendar and then surreptitiously
slip the games that I fancy during the first half of the season onto the kitchen
calendar. I repeat this exercise again in December when games in the second
half of the season can be added to the next year’s calendar. As my better half
turns the pages on the current one or starts transposing birthdays and
anniversaries to the new one we will revisit familiar, longstanding pantomime-like
exchanges. “Hang on. ‘Blackpool away’. When did you tell me you were going to
Blackpool?” “I don’t know precisely when! Ages ago! I definitely told you
though!” I did not tell her and she knows that I did not tell her. It is a game
within a game, but because I got them on there early enough, and provided that
any clash is not a major one, I can usually count on my pass being stamped.
I have not bothered with the kitchen calendar this year
though. What is the point? It was hard enough at the end of the last
season to look at the calendar and see everything, not just football, that we
were supposed to have been doing but were not doing. With still no end to this
interminable, half-existence in sight why subject myself to that misery again? As
I write this I do not know when I will next be on a football ground and that is
achingly dispiriting.
As Stevie Wonder knows, everybody’s got a thing and my thing
is football grounds. According to my footballgroundmap.com
account I have visited 88 grounds to date, which does not include the Nou Camp
stadium tour whilst on a family holiday to the Costa Brava when I was a kid. I
have watched football in England, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Portugal and Italy and I have
taken my own kids to grounds in France and America as part of our family
holidays. I have ticked off 51 of the current 91 league venues and whilst I am
generally led by Groucho Marx’s view on joining clubs I do like to picture
myself as an elderly gentleman proudly showing off a 92 Club tie one day.
I like football grounds because, and it might just be the
lockdown talking, they foster, no matter how large or small the capacity, a sense
of togetherness and belonging. Whether there are ten people in a ground, a
thousand, ten thousand, or more, everybody is there for the same reason.
Regardless of who you are, what you earn or your stance on the political chicanery of the day, whether you are there on their own and want to be left alone, or there
for a fun day out with family and friends, there is an instant affinity with your
fellow fan from the moment you first join the throng making it’s merry way to
the ground to the moment you return to your own reality at fulltime.
Bobby Charlton, a canny brand ambassador as well as a canny
player, coined the ‘Theatre of Dreams’ to describe Old Trafford, but it applies
equally to all grounds because all are layered with an annual dusting of early
season optimism. On the other side of the coin though of course are the
occasional sprinklings of end-of-season agony, but it all adds to a well of
collective memory, along with the individual matchday moments of triumph and tragedy, that can be drawn upon when needed. If that
person who might have been happy to be on their own that day ever met one of
that large group they would instantly have something in common. Those ‘I was
there too’ conversations. Football grounds are unique in playing host to that kind
of communal activity on that kind of scale.
I like
visiting new towns, well, historic towns and new towns (towns I have not been
to before, you get the point), and football is a reason not just to visit them
but to get under the skin of them. Most clubs can attribute their formation to the ‘Committee for the Establishment of Saturday Half
Holiday’, which was formed by a group of young men in Manchester in 1843 in
recognition of the need for workers to have more time off. Some clubs can
attribute their formation to the railway companies, armaments factories and
shipbuilders that let those young men enjoy that newfound freedom.
You
can tell a lot about a town from it's football ground. From faded Victorian seaside glamour to delusions of new town grandeur. The follies, the white
elephants, the clubs that leapt in to bed with partners that might have looked
fit the night before but turned out not to be proper. Some traditionalists might be clinging to the same patches of ground
that those nascent clubs were able to claim as their own way back in the day.
Some progressives might have moved to the trendy edge of town. All grounds
though in every village, town or city are landmarks or waymarkers in
the same way that pubs, churches and market places are. Football grounds tie the
past, present and future of places together.
It is of course the case that the brickwork of older grounds is
infused with more charm and character than the cladding of their contemporary stadium
counterparts and I certainly do not envy the chairman at my club having to
decide whether to push the ‘redevelopment’ or the ‘relocation’ button. To
modernise or die is an easy question to answer, but the question of where to
modernise is less straightforward, let alone the question of how. Unsanitary
burger vans and toilet layouts or sanitised seven-day-a-week, 52 weeks-a-year revenue
generating opportunities? I have been to the London Stadium. A house does not
make a home. The best of both the old and the new have an authenticity, a pride
and a sense of stewardship. Much like, on reflection, the best of our towns.
I miss football and I miss not being able to go to new places. I miss looking out for the floodlights. I miss either the boisterous train or tube
carriages or gambling on whether to park here or try to get a bit closer. I
miss investigating which pubs to meet friends in.
I miss away days providing some rhythm to the week, to the month,
and to the season. I miss having them to look forward to.
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