Games without Frontiers
Games without Frontiers
Joe Kennedy
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Barrow 3 – Darlington 0
CHAPTER ONE
“The One Moment, the One Match”: Football Modernism
Herne Bay 1 – Dulwich Hamlet 3
CHAPTER TWO
Players
Newcastle 0 – Arsenal 1
CHAPTER THREE
Tacconracy, Rationalism, Ontology and the Ends of Football
GAIS 0 – Hammarby 0
CHAPTER FOUR
Bad Wools and Plastics: Authenticity and Football’s “Distribution of The Sensible”
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Introduction
There is an anecdote told widely within British football culture which I believe is true when applied to one individual, and suspect is apocryphal in its many other applications. As far as I know, the verified example attaches itself to Len Shackleton, who played for Bradford Park Avenue, Newcastle and, most famously, for Sunderland in the English game’s post-World War II Golden Age. In Shackleton’s 1956 autobiography, The Clown Prince of Soccer, apparently, there is a chapter with the perhaps deliberately unwieldy title ‘The Average Director’s Knowledge of Football’. The rest of the page, or the following page, depending on who’s telling the story, is completely blank.
I’ve no desire to explain the joke, largely because it shouldn’t require explaining, but is it at all possible that Shackleton was, consciously or unconsciously, making a point other than the obvious one here? Isn’t there another way of interpreting what seems to be a throwaway literary sight-gag? Given the story of how football clubs have been owned, and what football’s owners have done with clubs, since the halcyon days of Shackleton, Jackie Milburn, Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney, isn’t it apparent that what the “average director” – and what a quaint, sepia-tinted term “director” now seems – really knows about football is that it, thrillingly and worryingly, lacks intrinsic meaning? By this, I mean that football means nothing whatsoever in its own right, which of course makes it into the ideal vehicle for any number of superimposed meanings.
This is certainly the case not least for those owners and “directors” who have, over the decades, seen football clubs as: instruments of civic and commercial leverage, concentrations of material stuff awaiting asset-stripping, objects of juvenile fantasy, sources of wealth from television and merchandise, and – most notably in the last ten years – political launderettes. Football means something very different for a Middle Eastern petrogarch buying a Premier League side and a South London property developer who purchases a non-league club in order to realise his vision of a Sainsbury’s on the site of their ground. That said, in neither case does the game as such really enter the equation.
This is, however, only one part of a far broader antagonism between the game described by the rules and the almost infinitely variable financial, emotional and political investments that are made in its name. From the very first time that you walk into a football ground, you are aware of the way in which the match is at best a single component of, and in some cases utterly peripheral to, the thing we unreflectively call “football”. Speaking as a fan and a (not sensationally good) player of almost three decades’ experience, what strikes me now is how central football has been not only to my understanding of more or less obviously related fields such as politics, history and economics, but also of areas which seem logically separate: literature, music, philosophy, critical theory. As a literature undergraduate at the then still theory-heavy University of East Anglia, my response to an essay task requiring a study of Roland Barthes’ ideas about narrative analysis was to illustrate these in relation to the 1970 World Cup final. It was fair payback: the reason literature, particularly of the demonstratively experimental sort, was my subject was at least in part to do with my introduction to various culty authors (Burroughs, Kafka, Ballard, Kerouac, Beckett) via football fanzines in the mid-1990s. I was completely unsurprised later on to find out how many theorists – amongst them Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco and Antonio Negri – were football fans.
That said, I never expected to write a book about football: while I was completing my PhD on wartime British modernism I played as many as three times a week and attended matches reasonably regularly, but predominantly in the name of relieving tension and boredom. It wasn’t until a couple of years later, lacking an academic post and living brokely in Boris Johnson’s ever-more homogenously bourgeois London that I started to think with any degree of rigour about how football locked into contemporary political formations, and whether or not it could be a site of resistance to neoliberal dominance in spite of the clear influence of neoliberalism at various levels of the game. Nevertheless, I found all too often that I was spending the time in which I could have been putting these ideas to paper going to football and becoming increasingly involved in supporter activism. Naturally, this meant a constant series of fluctuations and modulations in what I thought (or what I thought I thought) about the game. The biggest of these, I believe, was a progression from regarding football, or some football, as the site of a dubiously defined politics of authenticity to a position in which it became an arena in which “authenticity” became subject to conceptual collapse.
As a result, the approach I took to writing this book bifurcated between essays attempting a theoretical, albeit hopefully not grindingly academic, intervention into football and football culture, and accounts of particular matches that prompted some of the shifts in thinking I mention above. Inevitably, this leads to a certain unevenness of tone, although I’d argue in my defence that football itself is tonally inconsistent, given that it is the sum of all the instances in which a remarkably simple sport encounters its non-sporting outside. Derrida, who fantasised about becoming a professional footballer while a child in French Algeria, was surely being flippant or provocative when he claimed “beyond the touchline, there is nothing”. Football looks like twenty-two people kicking a ball about on a small patch of grass, or plastic, but it is absolutely not only, and not even mainly, this.
What I’ve attempted here, then, is a study of what “football” implies at a particular moment in (predominantly) British history. There are four travelogues, arranged in chronological order so as to be roughly contemporary with the theoretical development of the four essays, which can be described as follows. The first looks at the time-sense of football, noting that our experience, and perhaps our enjoyment, of the game is melancholy, arranged around a sense of loss. This is contextualised through a reading of early football’s historical simultaneity with the development of modernist aesthetics: both, I argue, trace the dematerialising, “melting” effects of industrial capitalism noted by Marx and Engels in a famous passage in The Communist Manifesto. Closing the circle, I then look at works of literature which have used football as a structural metaphor for a modernist or avant-garde poetics. Football, I claim here, should be considered a form of popular modernism, potentially possessive of all the radical cachet that implies. My second essay considers the ideological position occupied by football players in the early 21st century, regarding this in the light of contemporary militarism and popular discourses of “passion” and “commitment”. I then proceed to look at the gap which yawns between these discourses and the lived reality of being a footballer, particularly for the majority of players who constitute a reserve army of precarious labour mirroring that to be found in neoliberal “society” at large.
In the third essay, I begin by thinking about the attempts to eliminate error from football in the form of goal-line technology and video refereeing. This proceeds into a discussion of the sport’s increasingly sophisticated representation in video games, and how such games attempt to simulate the contingencies which simultaneously attract us to football and draw our attention to the necessary incompletion of its rules. I then look at how recent forms of tactical and statistical analysis constitute new attempts to reduce football’s contingency, thus enabling the final enclosure and commodification of the sport. The final essay examines the centrality of ideas about authenticity to football culture, examining the ways in which such ideas constitute an attempt to organise and limit the politics of footballing meaning. This is ultimately developed into a comparative discussion of the problems faced by a football culture obsessed with authenticity and the struggles of left-wing politics in Britain in 2015.
While this is a book meant to be enjoyed by football fans, I don’t believe that it is essentially about football, in as much as I don’t think football is essentially about football either. Some of what’s here counts as literary criticism; there are attempted glosses on various ideas from theorists including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Rancière. Hopefully, these are executed with a touch sufficiently light to prevent what I’m doing from falling into a conceptual niche, but with enough seriousness to avoid flippancy. I wrote this neither predominantly as a football fan nor as a theorist: instead, I wanted to see how the two ideas, football and theory, worked on one another. With this in mind, two lines of critique, both of which amount to essentially the same thing, can be anticipated. The first criticism – in the spirit of full disclosure, this is one which has already been made by football-fan friends in response to earlier articles – is that I’m being over-elaborate about an essentially simple subject. My response to that would be to say that so much has been written about football already, and that so much still clearly goes unsaid, that it’s worth risking allegations of pretension to try and figure out what earlier commentators have missed. The second criticism, I suspect, is more likely to come from the other direction: that all of this is simply an appropriation of a theoretical vocabulary to intellectually decorate a subject I have an unqualifiable personal interest in. To that, I’d have to ask what theories are for, if they can’t be used to unpack – and politicise – personal taste.
On the latter note, some of the writing here is more autobiographical than I predicted when first conceived of this book, and I’ve met (literally) hundreds of people who’ve given me pause for thought here. Hardly any of them are mentioned by name, but they became the implied readership of this book, and I’ve had plenty of imaginary conversations with them in which I face down various criticisms of the kind I speculate on above. If you’re one of these people, rest assured I’ve tried my hardest to take on board your own personal spec about “what football is”, and I’m very grateful for the debates and arguments on the subject which I hope (and expect) will carry on in real life.
Barrow 3 – Darlington 0
7 JANUARY 2012
Britain’s literary culture often asks us to imagine that things – love, trust, life itself – come to an end where the land does. Graham Greene told us as much in Brighton Rock; more recently, tawdry, salt-sprayed Margate epitomised coastal closure in Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders. It is hard to determine whether or not this is a case of poetic fallacy: for all of the seaside’s metaphorical potency, there’s some anthropological truth in the idea as well, as demonstrated by the clustering retirement homes of Eastbourne and Hunstanton, of Scarborough and Weston-Super-Mare. Those places have been chosen consciously as appropriate settings for personal denouements, in which the sharp air and long horizons permit settlements to be reached with the past.
The stretch of the littoral to which I was headed, as my brother and I pulled into an empty cinema car-park just outside Wolverhampton, was Barrow-in-Furness. Less a tastefully dilapidated Victorian resort than a struggling leftover of marine industry, Barrow’s reputation is for bleak vistas and connotations. In a geographical no-man’s-land between the Irish Sea and the southern Lake District, the town has been where Britain’s nuclear submarines have been manufactured since the Sixties. However, Vickers, the local shipyard, has seen a steady decline in contracts since the end of the Cold War, leading to unemployment and its attendant social effects. People I knew who had visited tended to divorce Barrow from the rest of Cumbria. Like Workington and Whitehaven further up the coast, it was regarded as inassimilable to the county’s self-image of nature-loving poets, anthropomorphic animals and heroically-doomed water-speed champions, an intrusion from an austere neighbouring North of factory chimneys, pit-wheels, pigeon racing and union banners. Even after the alleged modernisation of much of neighbouring Lancashire, Yorkshire and Country Durham by call centres and coffee chains, it supposedly exhibited this character.
I was travelling to Barrow in expectation of participating in a finale. This endgame was caught inextricably in the contradictory and often, at least to the outsider, unfathomable changes undergone by the North’s socio-economic landscape over the last three decades. For many years, Darlington Football Club typified the cash-poor, character-rich small teams from the coalfields, fishing ports and cotton towns who made up the numbers in the Football League. Like their counterparts in obscurity, they were administrated and financed by a combination of local worthies and self-made men, their boardroom a meeting place of dubiously motivated philanthropy and alderman politicking. Most seasons were a struggle: even when the rates were paid and the taxman appeased, success on the field was rare. They played at Feethams, a riverside ground celebrated for its quaintness, with a woodframed paddock and a shallow concrete bank which backed onto a 19th-century park laid out by the local Quakers, from whom the club take their nickname.
The tightness of their circumstances meant that every triumph, however inconsequential nationally, was relished. There was a fourth-round FA Cup victory over Chelsea in the 1950s, promotions in the late Sixties and mid-Eighties, and a back-to-back elevation at the beginning of the Nineties. The problems escalated here. With Feethams crumbling, a consignment of steel was purchased from Stockton Racecourse, where a stand was being dismantled, with a view to putting a much-needed roof over the terracing in preparation for the highly anticipated return to the Third Division. Stories conflict about what happened next – the metal may have been lost – but the roof never appeared. It was a bad omen, compounded soon enough by the club’s ambitious manager’s departure for Leicester City. An aging squad faltered in the higher league, despite costly attempts to buy a way out of trouble. Back in the basement division, a succession of managers laboured in the shadow of directorial infighting, signing veteran stars in fruitless efforts to galvanise an eddying side.
Around them, football in the North East was transforming in a way which reflected a more general confidence exhibited by the region as it started to shake off the traumas of Thatcherism. Forty miles up the A1 motorway, Newcastle United had weathered a disastrous five-year spell to flourish under Kevin Keegan’s management. Funded by the Geordie property developer John Hall, they launched a spirited quest to bring national and European success to Tyneside, an area which was in the process of casting off its Likely Lads image to reinvent itself as a swaggering regional capital, a Barcelona designed by John Poulson rather than Gaudi. Still closer to home, Middlesbrough built a new stadium with the backing of Teesside haulage magnate Steve Gibson, who also spent large sums to bring international talent to the club he’d supported as a boy. Sunderland, too, found a new home and returned to the top flight. Increasingly, the people of Darlington began to be drawn a little further afield to watch football, with the local club an unattractive contender in the North-Eastern sporting marketplace.
In 1999, a figure arrived who promised to change that. George Reynolds, a one-time Barnados boy, reformed safecracker, and among the UK’s wealthiest people thanks to his cornering of the chipboard and work-surface industry, bought the club and promised to take them to the Premier League, building a new stadium on the way. Unused to messiahs, or at least not particularly discerning on the rare occasions they turned up, Darlington’s supporters backed Reynolds, who initially seemed determined to keep his word as he lavished money on players. Swiftly, however, he became convinced that a winning team could be assembled for a fraction of the outlay he was making, leading to an abrupt downsizing following a narrow failure to gain promotion. A mixture of youngsters and obscurities therefore played out the last seasons at Feethams, failing to make headway in the league as construction progressed on the new ground. Worse than this was the dawning realisation that the Reynolds Arena, as it was to be known, was embarrassingly disproportionate to the modest requirements of the fanbase. As Darlington moved into the Arena, a state of open warfare existed between the owner and the majority of the supporters. The stadium, an ice-cold bowl of empty seats and echoing concourses, became off-limits to his critics. Most notoriously, a teenage fanzine editor, laughably compared to Goebbels by Reynolds, was banned from the ground; other opponents were allegedly subject to menacing late-night phone calls.
By the time the club shrugged off their hubristic owner, they were in administration and, yet again, fighting to remain in the league. Spirited performances saved them on the field, however, and new owners cut costs and spent prudently to assemble a reasonable, if inconsistent, side. Even as the football improved, however, gates dwindled. A new owner, George Houghton, covered the shortfall with his own money, but pulled out in 2009 leaving behind one of the highest wage bills at the level and instigating a second spell in administration. A collapse into the purgatory of non-league ensued, and, although incoming owner Raj Singh backed a triumph at Wembley in the FA Trophy (a knockout competition contested predominantly by semi-professional clubs) in 2011, it was clear that another crisis loomed. Just how quickly this occurred stunned supporters, who had hoped vainly that the Trophy might be a launchpad for reconstruction: in November 2011, following a predictably unsuccessful attempt to renegotiate the players’ wages, Singh left.
It looked terminal this time. The ground, encumbered with covenants forbidding non-sporting use, was in the hands of the previous administrators, who loaned it to the club for a nominal sum. Darlington’s only income streams were meagre ticket sales, occasional player transfers, and the pin-money of matchday income from programmes, food and drink. Accordingly, many of the non-playing staff were axed; the youth-team manager Craig Liddle, a well-regarded centre-half in the Reynolds-era team, took over management as senior players responded to the club’s defaulting on their salaries by leaving. Bringing a number of his protégés into the fray, Liddle oversaw the club as they scraped through their Christmas fixtures. The media, however, became convinced that the short trip to West Cumbria would be Darlington’s last journey, and contingency plans were made for a so-called “phoenix” side who would start playing at local league level in August 2012. With this in mind, the visit to Barrow was being presented as a wake. Lapsed supporters talked of returning from abroad to attend.
I vacillated as the day approached. I’d been attending since 1990, but the club’s departure from Feethams, and my own moves to East Anglia, Central Europe and eventually South London had left me relatively ambivalent. When I had cash, I’d attend flurries of games, preferring away matches at clubs with grounds less faceless than our Arena; when I was broke, I’d check the score online or text my brother. I wrote on the fans’ message board, but my contributions were almost exclusively nostalgic posts about the 1990s. When I played seven-a-side, I wore a Darlington shirt, but it was fourteen years old. Being a part-time follower of a North-Eastern also-ran seemed worthier than dabbling with Chelsea or Liverpool, but I felt a dilettante all the same.
Yet Barrow seemed a brilliantly poetic place for an ending, and my awkwardness about being involved began to be displaced by a familiar, prickly excitement. My brother told me that, if I could reach Wolverhampton, he’d arranged a space for me in a car going north, driven by someone he’d got in touch with through the message board. At more or less the last possible moment, I made my mind up to go; the die cast, I went to the pub with my partner and got slurringly, irresponsibly drunk. We fell asleep at three: at half-past six my alarm woke me, shuddering the bedside table. I staggered through a still-dark Camberwell to Denmark Hill, finding myself on a northbound train an hour later by way of Victoria and Euston. A wintry sun came up over the Chilterns, and I tried to read a novel, realising swiftly that I hadn’t yet sobered up. This was confirmed by the rambling incoherence I presented to my brother when he picked me up, took us back to his house for a swift cup of tea, and drove us to the junction where our rendezvous had been arranged.
Soon enough a hatchback, its front seats occupied by two men in strips from former seasons, pulled in and drove straight over to us. We got out as they did, exchanging slightly reticent greetings. It was P’s car. P was the same age as me, and fitted the profile – wry, self-deprecatingly ironic – of many live-away Darlingtonians I’d met. He’d driven from the South Coast, stopping near Bristol to pick up K, who’d travelled from Wales. K was older and, surprisingly, had no firm connection with Darlington beyond having been born on a nearby military base. He’d started supporting the club in the Nineties for what seemed slightly hard-to-fathom reasons, maintaining contact through the fanzine network and, more recently, online. He was taciturn, in a good-humoured way, and concerned he wouldn’t know anyone when he got to Barrow.
I can’t drive, and my brother’s insurance turned out on last-minute inspection not to be comprehensive, so we tucked into the back seat as K took over at the wheel. Coming into Staffordshire, rain and sleet hammered the windscreen and carriageway as wagons churned up water. If the geography was right for the occasion, the pathetic fallacy was also playing its part, setting up an appropriately muddy endgame. We passed fans of other clubs flying their scarves from rear windows, and swapped stories of away-day unruliness and adolescent memories of Feethams. Most of the players we talked about were mentioned at first because of their stunning inability or their dogged commitment to causes that weren’t so much lost as buried, fossilised and on the coal-heap. A few, we agreed, had seemed fantastic, but would have been well out of their depth just a level or so higher.