Saturday 23 August - Dulwich Hamlet 2 Lewes 0
Growing up is a process
of complication. That's a given, right? Experience means seeing a
series of tiny fragments of the whole – nowhere near enough to
understand, but enough to learn how complicated, and how ultimately
incomprehensible, existence is. Paradoxically, the more you learn,
the clearer it becomes that you can understand only an infinitesimal
sliver of the totality. (Which
may have been what Paul Weller was getting at.) And that's why
we get nostalgic – if we miss anything at all, we miss that time
when the world seemed simpler, possible to observe and catalogue in
its entirety if only one could live long enough and find the right
vantage point.
And clearly football's
no exception to this. In fact there's a whole class of websites,
magazines, and cheap late-night ITV4 clip shows pandering to our
desire to return to that simple time somewhere between Toto
Schillaci's brief spurt out of obscurity and Gareth Southgate's
underhit penalty, when the world – by which we mean major football
tournaments – seemed a simpler place.
I remember going to
Ashton Gate in the early '90s, and supporting City in just that
uncomplicated, no-strings-attached way was the simplest thing in the
world. I knew we were the ones in red; I knew which way we were
shooting in each half; and I picked up the players' names. Their
names – Gary Shelton, Rob Newman, Junior Bent - were all I really
needed to know. Where they'd come from, how old they were, how they
had been playing recently – these were irrelevancies. Less than
irrelevancies, they simply didn't occur. I knew that Bob Taylor
scored the most goals, both from watching him do so and from seeing
his name followed by a number between 1 and 90 beneath our score in
the Evening Post, so he got his poster on my bedroom door. Other
than that City were just the red team, with players as
interchangeable as those in a game of Sensible Soccer (and, to my
lasting frustration, a kit the manufacturers of Subbuteo considered
to be interchangeable with that of Wrexham, Benfica, Barnsley, and
even hated rivals Swindon Town).
It's not like that now,
is it? Partly because we've come to learn more about the world, and
partly because the process of doing so has expanded from Match
magazine to Wikipedia, YouTube, Football Weekly and all that, the
idea of watching the game in this charmingly juvenile way has become
a remote, prelapsarian dream.
Now
we know so much – in fact we know too much. Every touch is
contextualised, becoming either an OptaJoe stat, ammunition for one
side of a tedious forum argument, or both. Adam El-Abd came on for
Bristol City against Colchester and did fairly well. However his
first touch was misjudged and saw him pass the ball out of play
rather than knock it in front of Derrick Williams. My first reaction
wasn't to think that losing possession cheaply was a shame; it was to
think about the “narrative” of Adam El-Abd, more construct now
than human being, and how him giving away the ball played to one part
of it just as his thereafter solid defensive performance played to
the other. Shouldn't I just have been watching the game?
To
a degree this is my fault – after all it's up to me what I focus on
– but it's no great surprise if my internal football brain has been
contaminated with the same asides, pop-ups and captions that plague
televised football now. And the problem with this exposure isn't
just that it's distracting; it's also something that can actively
damage my perception of my club and reduce the wholeheartedness of my
support. I should have been pleased that the Reds beat the Blues
2-1. Instead, I was thinking about how we've got the bigger wage
bill by quite some distance and therefore 2-1 is a par score at best
– about how Colchester would have been delighted to have players of
the calibre of Luke Freeman, Wade Elliott and Luke Ayling lining up
in their shirts.
This
stuff spreads. We signed Kieron Agard the other day for a fee
reportedly not too far off a million pounds. Agard scored plenty for
Rotherham in this division last season and will, I'm sure, do
something similar for us. Yet a colleague at work pointed out how
unexcited I seemed. He was right; I was thinking about how we'd
become a huge spender in the division and therefore far from an
underdog. Given my natural sympathies to the less resourced and
funded sides I was having trouble squaring the circle. I've no
natural inclination to want a bigger side to go to Rochdale and pound
them yet my 24-year support of City tells me that I must. It's
heinously complicated.
Then
there's the rest of it – the former club legend, now kit man, who
spends his time on Twitter trying to see precisely how close to overt
sexism and transphobia he can get before anyone at all calls him out
on it (oh and Twitter, my God, how it fuels this stuff with its
constant retweeting of facts, “banter” and awful, awful jokes);
arguments about net spend, FFP compliance and all the other
accountancy shite which were not contributing factors to any of our
love affairs with football; the very existence of Jose Mourinho.
From micro to macro it's just offputting and every single bit of
extra information corrupts the basic purity of a game a five-year-old
can enjoy, and enjoy for the right reasons.
So
last weekend I went to Dulwich. And my God, what a relief; what an
incredible relief.
Suddenly
the team I want to win is just the team in the right colours (and the
pink/blue combination is clearly
the right set of colours). The manager doesn't have a Wikipedia
page. The only player I've heard of is Terrell Forbes, who captained
them and played for Yeovil for a bit. Their star man, Ashley Carew,
sounds like a Championship Manager regen. I couldn't name the
goalkeeper.
I
stood by the side of the pitch, drinking a pint or two of local ale,
in an atmosphere akin to a village fete's attempt to recreate the
Curva Sud on derby day – but even better than that sounds. I
spotted some people I vaguely recognised. The matchday sponsor was
my local, which happens to
do the best pizza in London. The local butcher sponsors the dugouts.
The fans were wonderful – behind whichever goal the home side
attacked, they chanted for 90 minutes and spent almost no time
moaning about misplaced passes or an insufficiently gung-ho
formation. Nobody appeared disappointed that the right winger failed
to combine Ronaldo's power and energy with Cruyff's football brain
and Makelele's workrate (something that enrages certain residents of
BS3). In the inevitably transient world of lower-league football
this was support for a team, a set of colours, an ideology even, far
more than a group of men looking forward to being disappointed by a
signing fee/goal return ratio.
It
was hard to feel that I hadn't found a gateway to a simpler, better
time. Whether it would feel the same without the trappings above I'm
not sure, but as a release from all the noise of modern-day football
without having
to give up football
it was unbeatable.
And
yet – I now know some of the players. I know how they play. I
know how a kid called Abdul came on and changed the game, injecting
genuine craft into the attack. I know about Ashley Carew and Xavier
Vidal. I know how much I like Terrell Forbes. Surfing the internet
after the game I found an article about Rio Ferdinand supporting the
club's academy and I turned away quickly. A little learning can
indeed be a dangerous thing.
I
can already feel the taint of knowledge starting to ruin Dulwich
Hamlet for me, turning what is at present a delightfully idealised
little crush into a tediously flesh-and-blood pursuit. It'll happen,
of course it will – and that's good, because it means that Bristol
City, flaws, financial aggression and all, will always be number one.
But I'll keep spending the odd Saturday at Champion Hill, little
enough to avoid developing insidious opinions, sufficient however to
scratch the itch of football for the sake of football, rather than as
fodder for an argument. If I'm very lucky then some of the love
rekindled that way will spill back into the old relationship and
we'll all benefit. If not then hey; the Dulwich scarves will make a
lovely accessory this winter.
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