Football returns, but ‘we’re not really here’
With the exception of 1989, which featured the Satanic Verses fatwa, Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain, it’s hard to think of as tumultuous a year in my lifetime. Back then, though, we led far more localized lives. Without the Internet, 24-hour television channels and all-encompassing social media, it was perfectly possible to be blissfully unaware of what had irked Ayatollah Khomenei or Nicolae Ceaușescu’s death by firing squad.
Those events may have caused tremors but they didn’t bring the rest of the world to a standstill. It’s a very different story in 2020, with Covid-19 and protests against deep-rooted injustices around the world. Unless you live in a cave in some remote mountain range, you’re likely to have been affected by it in some way.
Sport, which has often served as a balm in times of strife, has been just as badly affected. By the time last night’s game between Aston Villa and Sheffield United in the English Premier League kicked off, it had been more than 99 days since the previous match in the competition. Most are us cannot recall a longer hiatus. And we certainly hadn’t watched English club football in June.
More than 42,000 people have lost their lives to the virus in the UK alone. Millions more have been adversely affected by the lockdown put in place to try and control its spread. Many lower-league football clubs face uncertain futures, especially with crowds unlikely to be allowed into stadiums over the next 12 months.
They used recorded crowd noise for the day’s second match, between Manchester City and Arsenal, but there was an eeriness to the spectacle. The players were about their business as professionals do, but there was no showboating and no feigning injury to get the crowd wound up. When there are only empty plastic seats looking on, what’s the point?
The sense of loss too was inescapable. Football has hardly been immune from it. Up in the Holt End at Villa Park, a steward’s orange jacket had been draped across a seat. It was emblazoned with the characters “RS 79”. Ron Smith, the father of Dean Smith, the Villa manager, died at a care home in May after contracting the virus. He had been suffering from dementia.
Smith Senior had been a steward at Villa Park, and a lifelong fan. There have been many poignant images from across the world over the past three months, but few will stay in my mind as long as the sight of that lone jacket placed between two blue seats.
Smith wasn’t the only one dealing with personal loss. Pep Guardiola’s mother died in Spain in April after contracting the virus, and he has spoken with his usual eloquence of the sense of hurt that millions of people are now dealing with. Though once a vocal advocate of the Jock Stein dictum that football without the fans is nothing, Guardiola has now come around to the idea that the return of sport, even if only on TV screens, may provide some solace in an increasingly bleak landscape.
Both matches also served as a reminder that we live in a global village, that what happens in Minnesota is as keenly felt in Birmingham and Manchester. The back of every player’s shirt said ‘Black Lives Matter’, and they, along with the staff, all took a knee before the start of play. The absence of names was a powerful statement in a league where as many as 30 per cent of the players are black, and where racism on the terraces has made a disturbing comeback in recent seasons.
Guardiola spoke of his sense of shame at the treatment of black people around the world, and support from players of all nationalities and races should ensure that the discussion doesn’t go away any time soon. There are still undercurrents of racial stereotyping when it comes to coverage of young black footballers and their lifestyles, and the media will have to introspect on its own role in the days ahead.
For now, though, the football is back. Only, it’s nothing like the spectacle we’ve known. Behind the goals at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester and on either side of the halfway line, entire sections of stands had been draped with banners that said: “We’re not really here.”
The chant which became popular with City fans in the late 1990s, when they were playing in the third tier of English football, was originally a tribute to a young man who committed suicide in the early 1990s. He wasn’t even a City fan, but it was they that took up the words as the club’s fortunes went from bad to worse.
‘We’re not really here’ is now a tribute both to the fans temporarily exiled from their houses of the holy, and also to those whose lives will never be the same again thanks to the effects of both the virus and racism. It’s also a reminder to each of us to savour what we have, because it, and we, certainly won’t be around forever.