WHAT FOOTBALL LACKS WITHOUT ITS FANS

England vs Croatia: This was football without fans, without emotion, without noise, without tension. What was left was not football, but quite the opposite.

England avoided defeat in Croatia Friday, but football lost. In a near-empty ground on the edge of Rijeka, the few hundred people present got a vision of a new form of the game. Football without fans, without emotion, without noise, without tension and without stakes. What was left was not football at all, but quite the opposite.

Only in the second half did this game come close to resembling what we would normally expect from the game. Marcus Rashford and Harry Kane had chances to win it for England, and it was Gareth Southgate’s side who adjusted better to the reality of this surreal evening. Croatia barely did that at all, although both teams were just as guilty for a first half that was as unrecognisably flat as anything you will ever see from 22 highly-paid professionals playing in an organised competition.

You can point to technical explanations for this: Croatia’s post-World Cup comedown. The rudimentary pairing of Eric Dier and Jordan Henderson in midfield. Gareth Southgate’s return to a back four. Confusion about the new Uefa Nations League format. The international retirement of Mario Mandzukic. But none of those reasons has the slightest relevance to why this game was as flat as it was.

Football at almost any level is meant to be a dialogue between the players and the crowd, a give- and-take of emotional energy over the course of 90 minutes. Anyone who has ever been to football knows this. Whether the emotion is joy, fear, arrogance, anger or pride, the process is the same. Fans and players reflect and respond to each other’s prompts. That is why home advantage, the most technically inexplicable dynamic in sport, remains so powerful.

Here, one half of that relationship was removed. Yes there were a few dozen England fans on a hillside far up behind one goal, but they were barely audible and wholly invisible from the pitch. There were a few journalists and officials in the stand who would applaud the best play from their side. But there were no fans and there was no crowd. Noone to set an emotional tone, to remind the players of the stakes, or to meaningfully respond to what was happening on the pitch.

This is why the players found it so difficult in the first half, because they had no energy to draw from. Three months ago these two teams played a World Cup semi-final at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. That was a night that felt as if it went in fast-forward, from the stirring national anthems onwards. England began at a ferocious pace before running out of steam, as Croatia found a patriotic fire within themselves, thanks to that symbiotic exchange between their players and fans.

Here, it was so quiet before the anthems that you could hear the slap of the players shaking hands on the pitch. One official had a casual phone-call on the touchline just before kickoff. When the game began, it felt as if it happened at half-speed, and everything that happened was fully audible from five rows back in the stands.

Jordan Henderson and Harry Kane trying to micromanage Raheem Sterling’s pressing. Jordan Pickford’s constant stream of noise. Southgate encouraging Kyle Walker forwards. John Stones telling Henderson to drop in while Walker was upfield. Henderson asking Croatia manager Zlatko Dalic “are you the fucking referee?” The actual referee Felix Brych telling Ross Barkley he did not get a penalty because he went down “too easy”. Stones staying in the ears of all the officials over every contested decision.

It was a new experience in watching football. If you go to your nearest ground for Non-League Day tomorrow you will likely hear with less clarity than this. Some might argue that it was a purer, cleaner form of the game, dissected and sterilised, away from the noisy chaos of the crowd. But to see the game devoid of community, atmosphere and energy was to see an empty shell of the game itself.

But while this was a miserable, regrettable experience, and would have been even if England had won, that does not mean it should not have been this way. Croatia were forced to play behind closed doors, remember, because in June 2015 a swastika was chemically burned onto the pitch of the Poljud Stadium in Split ahead of Croatia’s Euro 2016 qualifier against Italy. That prompted a two-game supporter ban in Uefa-sanctioned home matches, the second of which was tonight. Even that game was itself played behind closed doors because of racist chanting in a game against Norway in Zagreb earlier that year.

Uefa were right to issue this ban and they must be even harder on racist crowds in future. Because anti-football like this is a price that the game must play until it cleans itself up. If football cannot be for everyone then it can only be for no-one. THE INDEPENDENT