Sports and Masculinity Theme Analysis

I remember the overwhelming maleness of it all—cigar and pipe smoke, foul language (words I had heard before, but not from adults, not at that volume), and only years later did it occur to me that this was bound to have an effect on a boy who lived with his mother and sister; and I remember looking at the crowd more than at the players.

On Saturdays, it seems to me now, we enacted a weird little parody of a sitcom married couple: she would take me down to the station, I’d go on the train up to London, do my man’s stuff and ring her from the forecourt call-box when I got back for a lift home. She would then put my tea on the table and I ate while I talked about my day and, sweetly, she would ask questions about a subject that she didn’t know much about, but tried to take an interest in anyway, for my sake.

Marriages are nowhere near as rigid—you won’t catch any Arsenal fans slipping off to Tottenham for a bit of extra-marital slap and tickle, and though divorce is a possibility (you can just stop going if things get too bad), getting hitched again is out of the question.

The art deco splendour of the West Stand was not possible without Dad’s deeper pockets, so Rat and I stood in the Schoolboys’ Enclosure, peering at the game through the legs of the linesmen.

It’s easy to forget that we can pick and choose. Theoretically it is possible to like football, soul music and beer, for example, but to abhor breast-grabbing and bottom-pinching (or, one has to concede, vice versa): one can admire Muriel Spark and Bryan Robson.

What I enjoyed most of all, however, was the way the players revealed themselves, their characters and their flaws, almost immediately.

No, you see, in England somebody, somewhere, knew what they were doing, and there was this system, which nobody ever explained to us, that prevented accidents of this kind. It might seem as though the authorities, the club and the police were pushing their luck on occasions, but that was because we didn’t understand properly how they were organising things.

You couldn’t look at those Liverpool fans and ask yourself, as you had been able to do with the Millwall fans at Luton, or the Chelsea fans in their League Cup match, ‘Who are these people?’; you already knew.

[…] the clubs, I’m afraid to say, did nothing; this one poignant little gesture would have cost them a few bob, so they scrapped it.

‘Here come the fucking Wongs’, remarked one of a group of young men, as I led my charges down the steps to find a position from which we could see at least a square of the pitch. I didn’t bother translating.

But it gets harder and harder, and sometimes hurting someone is unavoidable.

Over the years we have come to confuse football with something else, something more necessary, which is why these cries of outrage are so heartfelt and so indignant.