The DREAMY GAME

Four days in London can have quite an effect on you. I hadn’t been home twelve hours before I knew that I’d picked up a bug. This nearly always happens now when I go to town. There came a point when the return visits to the city where I lived for nigh on 40 years became far enough spaced out that I lost my immunity to it. I’m sure that the source of this vulnerability is public transport, particularly the underground. So many germs get trapped down there in the carriages where they multiply and seek new victims. Residents are immune; visitors are not.

My generation was taught to “put your hand in front when you cough”. There was even a lyric, sung to the tune of Deutschland über Alles: “Coughs and sneezes/Spread diseases;/Catch them in your hand-ker-chief”. Nobody bothers now. A man passed me in the street, respectable enough in suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, and just before he drew level he sent an explosive, unstifled cough into the air all around both of us. Maybe he was the one who infected me.

I rose into semi-consciousness while it was still dark this morning. My throat was fiercely sore but I wasn’t awake enough to do anything about it. I had a half-awake dream about Sol Campbell. This is pretty odd. I know three things about Mr Campbell: he is a footballer though I couldn’t guess for which club he plays; he is of Afro-Caribbean appearance though, had I walked into my London hostess’s living room and he had been sitting on the sofa, I would not have known who he was; there have been persistent rumours, strongly denied, concerning his sexual orientation. Probably this third element prompted the dream.

Why did I dream of a footballer? I mock my football-following friends of whom there are rather few though the friend with whom I stayed is certainly the most devoted: she and her daughter support Fulham (evidence of true devotion, I believe). So I guess football was more in my head than usual. But I do take more of an academic interest in the game than I usually pretend. I never actually watch it on television and the last time I went to a match was at Upton Park at the end of the 1960s when – I guess, though I don’t really remember – West Ham would have been playing host to Manchester United, among whose most enthusiastic fans was a fellow member of the student group with whom I was then sharing a flat. At that time I developed a temporary interest in football managers and their psychology, so I know who the likes of Bill Shankly, Joe Mercer, Malcolm Allison and Brian Clough were. Shankly, a fascinating character and a legendary manager of Liverpool when it was the dominant team in England, famously declared in his deep Scottish brogue that “football isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s more important than that”. Of course it wasn’t meant as a joke.

Apart from unavoidably seeing snatches of matches on television news (BBC News is little less than obsessed with English football), I often watch Final Score on BBC1 on a Saturday afternoon, largely to catch the results for the teams that are based in the part of the world where I grew up, namely Northampton Town, Kettering and Rushden & Diamonds, the latter persistently mispronounced by presenter Ray Stubbs and results reader Tim Gudgeon: it’s Ruzhden, not Rushton. I have no feeling for the teams that represent the area where we now live. On Sunday, I look at the sports pages to see the tables and upcoming fixtures for the Northants teams and take a mild interest in other clubs for arbitrary resonances or ancient associations: Liverpool, West Ham, Stoke City, Ipswich, Reading, Southampton, Nottingham Forest, Accrington Stanley. Though I lived for more than twenty years in the catchment area of Arsenal, I never had any curiosity about that particular club which anyway now lives further off; after all, its origins lie on the far side of the Thames.

On Friday, I went to a pub on the Great West Road to see a man about a debt. I got there on the stroke of noon and found the pub closed. Two men were outside at one of the pub tables, one seated, the other standing. I asked the seated one if he knew when the pub opened. “It should open at twelve” he said. “Oh,” said I, “any minute now, then”. “I certainly hope so” said the man who was standing. I looked at him for the first time. It was John Motson. I betrayed no flicker of reaction. I know enough people in the public eye to understand that having a quiet drink is an important oasis.

Then the pub opened and I followed them in. ‘Motty’, as I understand the BBC’s chief football commentator is known, ordered a cider shandy, a suitably abstemious beverage. My debtor was late. I looked over at the pair I’d earlier addressed, the only other people in the bar. Their conversation was just a burble within which “BBC” was occasionally discernible. I decided that, after all, I did want to approach Mr Motson. I would wait until his colleague went to the bar, then nip across and say: “Excuse me for being presumptuous. I know nothing of football, but your fame and the great affection in which you are held extends far beyond the realms of football and I do hope you know that”. That would be all, it wouldn’t be an opening gambit. He could hardly be other than gratified. And I meant it. I avoid the word “icon” like the plague but if it must be used in its contemporary meaning it could hardly apply more properly to anyone else. However, the pair had the one drink and left. It was perhaps just as well because, on both occasions that I retailed this anecdote, I found myself unaccountably filling up. Why?

Does football run deeper than I know in the national – indeed global – consciousness? I hope not. From my detached perspective – though it is clearly far less detached than I imagine – football represents much of what I deplore: blokes, grotesque overpayment, naked marketing and exploitation, gratuitous competitiveness, continuously unsporting behaviour, the elevation of something wholly trivial into something that grown-ups imagine is more “important” than their own lives (and deaths), a culture that is violent, drunken, exclusive, self-important, grasping, frequently racist and xenophobic, always misogynistic and homophobic. What can football possibly mean to me?

Well, something clearly. Not enough to make me want the World Cup to come to Britain, any more than I welcome the 2012 Olympics which, as I predicted long before London “won” the struggle to stage it, will cost us dear – primarily financially but in other ways too – for decades to come. Certainly, I hope not to dream about any more footballers, particularly ones of whom I have no more than a sketchy image. Let’s hope it was just the effect of London germs.