Crying in the kitchen at the noise of football fans…

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All it took was a purr of appreciation from Villa fans and John Nicholson was crying in the kitchen…

It’s always the small things that get you.

I was listening to the final day commentaries on 5live, specifically the Aston Villa v Chelsea game. Villa cleared a ball, Jack Grealish took it down and laid it off in one highly skilled moment. And then it happened.

That noise. So missed, for so long.

A purr of appreciation rippled around the ground.

It sounds like nothing else. It’s a standard football sound, but it made all that fake crowd noise seem stupid and ridiculous. This was the real thing, instinctive and from the heart, without any contrivance or forethought. Just that noise we all make when someone does something great on a pitch.

Standing in my kitchen, preparing a lamb noisette, big fat tears rolled down my cheeks. All the pent-up, repressed emotion from the last 15 months poured out. Fuck it. All those people gone. Shit.

It was like meeting an old, old friend. Something I’d taken for granted for all my life – until last year – had returned. All the long years going to the football, to Hull City, to the Boro, to Darlo, to Billingham Synthonia, to Pools, to Newcastle, to Sunderland to Hibs, to Greenock Morton and even to fucking Spartans in the Scottish fifth tier. Big crowds, small crowds, it made no difference. All had that purr. Oh yes yes yes…this is what it is all about. This is what has been robbed from us for what feels like forever. This is ours.

It was a great commentary by Ian Dennis, driven on by the noise in the stadium even if it was only 15% of capacity. It sounded full. “Listen to the noise in Villa Park!” he yelled, rightly getting carried away by it. The roar after a goal, the roar for a penalty. The instinctive clapping and the shocked silence that an away goal always brings. This is our aural lexicon, denied us so long. It is the finest tune to hear again.

The ups and downs of the final day’s results made for great drama, and suddenly, it mattered. People being there made it matter. All season long I had struggled. Some said football had helped them get through the lockdowns, others that it was better than nothing. Fair enough. I understand. But not for me, Clive.

Wolves fans

I tried. I really did. Tried watching highlights, tried watching live games when they were on free-to-air television but failed to be able to take any of it seriously. It looked plastic, a dress rehearsal; an imitation of the real thing. Without fans it profoundly lacked meaning or point. The only joy was in moments of high skill, such as Erik Lamela’s magical rabona or Alisson’s last-gasp header. In a season that was exhibition not competition, that seemed right. Game after game after game came and went, flushed down the football drain like so much slurry on a pig farm, an indistinguishable mass of sporting effluent.

I enjoyed St Johnstone’s history-making cup double. Same goes for Sutton United being promoted out of the National League for the first time in their history and Kelty Hearts, likewise. But time and again as I stared at the screen, or listened to the radio, I kept asking myself why was it happening and who was it all being played for?

The answer was, of course, the most important people to the Premier League, despite being invisible to each other: the TV audience. An audience that didn’t even have to be there, as long as they had paid.

The Premier League’s whole decrepit, dishonest and failing financial structure relies on the rights fees welfare payments, not on earned matchday income. The pandemic has shown us ever more clearly how clubs have become rights fee junkies, always jonesing to mainline another hit of cold hard cash. While lower-league clubs dependent for survival on matchday income were asked to play without any such income being available, top-flight clubs knew that as long as they took to the pitch, the money would keep flowing like a polluted river.

Viewing numbers were initially a little higher for games between big clubs, and a little smaller for games between less popular clubs, but soon ended up within the usual brackets of unpopularity. Those who thought people would flock to watch Sky and BT Sport to relieve the boredom were wrong. Those who thought fanless football would put everyone off, were also wrong. Perhaps we all underestimated the extent to which life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.

On the pitch, though players were not allowed to say so for obvious reasons, they didn’t seem overly bothered that no-one was watching in the ground. Some were clearly liberated by it. They celebrated a goal, saluted the empty rows of seats and jumped all over each other, as they ever do. Seeing this, we had a right to question whether we were ever needed in the ground at all. Everything felt lost.

Three lucky clubs were relegated out of the Premier League holding large parachute payments of cash, back into a more real world, albeit one where unreal wages exceed income. Back to a football world not polluted with the heinous VAR, a system held in such contempt by the majority of the paying public, it is surely unsustainable when fans return en masse.

Many of us found some relief from inevitable depression in Marcus Rashford’s successful campaigns and many clubs’ efforts in the local community, though we despaired that they were even needed. What sort of country are we living in where four million kids live in poverty, surviving on food banks to fill their bellies?

We remain an unhappy nation, deliberately divided against each other by a mendacious political class, loaded like a freight train on antidepressants, drink, drugs and food. No nation at ease with itself is so fat, doped up, depressed, angry at everything and at each other. Covid hasn’t done this. This is what our economic system and those who promulgate it has delivered. At times it has felt as though people have been arguing for the right to be kicked repeatedly in the face by people who hate them. It does not have to be like this.

Throughout the last year, football TV has carried on showing and talking about football largely as though everything was normal, at least until the super league blip. Football podcasts proliferated to such an extent that I doubt there is any male between the age of 30 and 40 with a scraggy beard that hasn’t been on one. Those of us who prefer podcasts and radio, the theatre of the mind, for our football content, have clung to it like a life raft in the spookily becalmed seas for well over a year now.

The much-misunderstood super league proposal and the 48-hour debacle that followed, gave brief hope for profound change. A league with those six sides cut adrift would’ve been wonderful for everyone else.

It was never going to bring about the end of the pyramid, as was wrongly said, only the end of the Premier League and in doing so would have instituted a complete financial reboot of the entire structure and a chance to restore sanity. We lost that chance.

We didn’t save football by fighting against the super league, as some boasted, we just preserved massive fiscal inequality, some truly awful owners and a financial structure which relies on loss-making broadcasters’ largesse to prop up a morally bankrupt wage structure and transfer fee environment. It turned out the Premier League’s 29 years of propaganda has gone so deep that enough people jumped to defend it against this supposed threat, as though it was the good and natural state of things. It isn’t. It is the tap root of all the problems.

But on Sunday, crowds returned to once again irrigate football’s lifeless desert.

At last, the game had its meaning returned to it, not by the appalling owners, not by massive rights fees, not by broadcaster cameras, not by VAR, not by sleeve sponsors and noodle partners, not by a betting firm’s acca, no, but by those who made it The People’s Game: the fucking people. Because, as these last 15 months have shown, football is nothing without fans. Absolutely, fucking nothing. But with them, it is everything.

And I’ve fucking well gone again.

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