An innocent picture, an act of kindness... and why sport matters more than ever at a time like this
JUST after midday on Monday, a stranger sent me a tweet. It was a link to a newspaper article that had appeared some time in 1970. In the middle of the spread, which was in a section called TV Talk, there was a photograph of my mum and dad and me.
Beside it was an interview with my mum about her role as Miss Nugent in Coronation Street. I was four years old, the article said. I was playing with a toy car and a loop-the-loop contraption of some sort. We all looked happy.
The person who had forwarded me the picture left a nice, simple message alongside it. ‘Check out this photo of you and your parents from back in the day,’ he had written.
I hadn’t seen the photograph before. It felt good to see my parents so young and I thought I looked a little bit how my own son looks now. There was something poignant about it too, as there often is with an image that illustrates the passing of time.
I replied to the message and thanked the man who had sent it. ‘No worries at all,’ he wrote back. ‘ It’s a great pic. Hope Eileen is doing well. I miss her on our screens.’
I told my mum about the picture. She was pleased too and said how nice it was of the young man to send the photo to us. I said I’d bring it up to show her the next time I came to Manchester to visit.
It is not often you are a beneficiary of random acts of kindness on Twitter and I looked at the potted biography of the guy who had sent the photo and at some of his tweets. He seemed full of happiness, gentleness and love for life. His name was Martyn Hett.
On Wednesday evening, I sat down to watch the Europa League final between Manchester United and Ajax and got another message. It said that Martyn had been killed in the terrorist attack on the Manchester Arena on Monday night. I hadn’t even known him but I found it hard to take in. He was only 29.
When the game was over and United had won, I watched Paul Pogba dedicating the victory to the victims of the attack. United and their supporters dealt with the occasion with great dignity and sensitivity. They are the symbol of the city. Two days after the attack, they won a trophy. They did what they could to ease the pain. And yet some people were already saying sport was meaningless at a time like this. They said sport didn’t matter. They said football didn’t matter. And that people breaking into a spontaneous version of Don’t Look Back in at a vigil in a Manchester square didn’t matter. They said that holding up banners at a football match in Stockholm wouldn’t do anything to stop Islamic extremists murdering innocent people like Martyn Hett at that Ariana Grande gig.
They said that United winning or losing a football match was irrelevant in the battle against the kind of warped minds that would target children and young people at a pop concert, as if turning to sport, or music, as a source of comfort and inspiration in the face of terrorism was a sign of a society gone soft.
Words like‘ internment’ and ‘deportation’ were deployed. Many of these people probably thought President Trump’s $350 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia was great news. The sad thing is that those people are stuck in a cycle of vengeance and despair. They seek division and conflict as solutions, just as the terrorists do. But sport is not about division.
‘Football divides us but only in a pantomime way,’ said the BBC sports presenter Mark Chapman, in his moving radio tribute to Manchester on Wednesday night. And he was right because, for all its tribalism and its confrontational language, sport in this country is something that unites people.
Which is why the truth is that sport matters more than ever at a time like this.
It is not just about defiance, although refusing to allow our lives to be shaped by despicable acts of terrorism is important. It is also about continuing to do things we love and which make us happy and which feed community spirit and which build fraternity.
And for millions of us in this country, that means sport.
Terrorists know how important sport and music are to the psyche of countries l i ke England and France. They know t hey are inseparable from the optimism of
DROPPED by his country and restricted to a couple of minutes in the Europa League final, Wayne Rooney is being written out of English football with unseemly haste. His time at Manchester United is clearly coming to an end but he still has the talent to shine in the Premier League if used intelligently by his manager. I think he still has a lot to offer our game. Rather than go to China, I hope he ends up back at Goodison Park. Not for a retirement party but to enjoy an Indian summer. youth and the language of escape. That is why they targeted the Bataclan concert hall and a football match at the Stade de France during the Paris attacks in 2015. That is why they attacked a concert venue in Manchester.
So, yes, it mattered that Manchester City released a message in the immediate aftermath of United’s victory that said simply: ‘ A City United.’ It mattered that the two clubs are donating £1million to the We Love Manchester Emergency Fund. It mattered that they put their rivalry aside.
It mattered, too, that the GreatCity Games went ahead in Manchester on Friday night. And that the Great Manchester Run is taking place today and that 35,000 competitors are running and that thousands more will come on to the streets of the city to support them.
Anything that strengthens the bonds between us, when others would seek to loosen them, is worth cherishing. Anything that can knit a community closer together than it was before it was attacked is worth championing.
If you’ve ever taken part in an event like the Great Manchester Run, you will know what it is like to be bolstered by one of a million random acts of kindness from people you have never met before, people who come to cheer on strangers and loved ones alike.
More than any personal best or any athletic achievement, t he memory of those people is what stays with you. It makes your soul sing when you encounter people like that. People that you run past in your life and who do something generous for someone they don’t know.
People like Martyn Hett.