FANS ARE BACK.. BUT FOR ONE WEEK ONLY
SCOTTISH football threw the turnstiles open for the first time this season as a limited number of spectators attended Premiership matches in Dingwall and Aberdeen.
Three hundred supporters were allowed entry to both Ross County’s home defeat to Celtic and Aberdeen’s win over Kilmarnock, with both fixtures passing with apparent success.
However, fans will have to wait for their next taste of live action as plans for further test events next weekend have been shelved amid an upsurge of coronavirus cases in several areas of Scotland. FALL IN LOVE WITH FOOTBALL AGAIN
THE text message bearing the news contained the kind of enthusiasm last seen when Charlie Bucket opened that Wonka bar and caught a flash of gold peeking out from behind the wrapper. My friend Graeme’s wife and son had won tickets in the ballot for yesterday’s visit of Kilmarnock to Pittodrie. Joy was unconfined. It didn’t matter that you couldn’t stand, couldn’t sing, couldn’t throw the ball back onto the park, could barely go to the toilet without filling in a risk-assessment form.
This was a chance to return to somewhere loved and missed. To give Saturdays a sense of occasion again. To share something meaningful amid familiar faces and maintain a hold, however tenuous, on the essential hope these things we once took for granted will underpin our lives again when Covid-19 has gone the way of Third Lanark and Cowlairs.
Over the past six weeks, some of us have had the chance to attend matches in this peculiar environment of face masks, distancing and relative silence. It has been odd, yet oddly reassuring.
Catching up with people you know, no matter how vaguely, has been a welcome reminder of what almost seems a former existence. The games, even though you can’t get close to a pie far less a pint, have felt like a day out.
Going to the football has become special again. It will be interesting to hear what the 600 who got in at Aberdeen and Dingwall yesterday made of their brief taste.
Even though the hope of future test events has been dashed for now, it is unlikely many will have regarded it as soulless or pointless.
Rather, it is likely to sustain them during darker weeks ahead. Because if this recent period has taught us anything, it is that watching matches on telly is not what being a football fan is about.
It is about memories, friendships, adventures. Being there. And it is this that Scottish football’s authorities must tap into whenever we do return to normal — because the desire to get back into grounds and be part of that communal experience should be greater than it has been for some time.
People such as Neil Doncaster, the SPFL chief executive, seem preoccupied with predicting Armageddon and protecting broadcast deals. That’s their job.
Clubs won’t die, though. If they go bust, they’ll come back. Football will be waiting for us no matter how long it takes. And it is almost certain to find that many of us have used this time to reflect on the role it really plays in our lives.
You can get tired of it. I have. Rising prices, declining standards, overzealous stewarding, petty squabbles, political crackdowns on anything that reflects working-class culture, clubs that change their whole team every season. It all lessens the appeal.
Yet, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, do you? That’s Joni Mitchell, by the way. Not Doncaster’s SPL predecessor Roger.
Home renovations this week have delivered keen reminders of the ways football shapes a life. A long-forgotten box of scarves brings a snapshot into foreign travels of my youth and the many, erm, interesting characters met along the way. Verona’s Brigate Gialloblu. Ultras Sur at Real Madrid. Vardar Skopje’s Komiti.
Spotting some of the memorabilia lying around this building site of a house, the plumber in to fix the sink shares his splendid tales of following Rangers in Europe and his hilarious pictures of getting into the Stuttgart game of yesteryear, dressed up as a trackside photographer.
These yarns are an enthusiast’s meat and drink. And they will keep us going until the opportunities exist to make more. For me, just thinking about past journeys has rekindled an appreciation of football’s major purpose that had definitely faltered down the years.
I met my wife through football, for starters. The aforementioned Graeme, a solid comrade of 28 years, was befriended on a journey to a game.
Two of maybe seven Scotland punters at an Under-21 match in a small Swedish town, we shared a bottle of whisky on a flight to Gothenburg and went straight off the plane to the Ullevi Stadium to sing songs about Johnny Ekstroem through the flares of the IFK end.
We took a case of Pilsner Patrik’s home-made beer into (Swedish club) Perstorps SK and spent half-time having a kickabout on the pitch with the manager’s kids.
I got my skull fractured in Latvia. One night after a guy put a gun to it. Then hitched a lift across the border to Estonia for a game in which the opposition didn’t even turn up.
I bumped into Robert Downey Jr and Marisa Tomei making a film in Rome at three in the morning and had a ham piece and a cup of coffee provided by the caterers and a blether provided by the stars.
I also woke up on that shingle beach in Nice at six in the morning to find someone had stolen my trainers.
Then there was Estoril and Lisbon. God, aye. That’s when big Wull turned up on his first holiday abroad and got lifted within an hour for climbing a statue.
What things have been seen. And heard. And smelt. That smoke in the air on those visits to the subterranean bearpit of Red Star Belgrade’s Marakana.
The foundations of Fenerbahce’s Sukru Saracoglu shaking with that unimaginable, relentless noise. The buzz of the teams coming out of the tunnel at the corner of Marseille’s old Velodrome to the sounds of Van Halen’s Jump.
There are the pubs that made game day a joy. The Tynecastle Arms. Stark’s Bar. The Stag’s Head at Dumbarton. Jumping out of Links Park at Montrose at half-time to nip round to the British Legion — and not going back.
The welcoming embrace of the Social Club at Auchinleck and the even warmer feeling of still paying just £2.80 a pint.
And then there’s the food. The array of treats — home-made soup, empire biscuits — in that stall of all stalls under the Main Stand at Cappielow. Burning the skin off your mouth with a steak bridie at Dunfermline. Killie’s pies.
Even the bad days have something good. Wembley at Euro 96, behind the very goal where Gary McAllister missed that penalty, ended at an all-night rave in a flat in Vauxhall.
As for the good days? Well, they can be transcendental. Carried 10 yards across the old Hampden slopes, feet not touching the ground, in an exultant mass of humanity. Seeing that irresistible mid-1990s Ajax rule the Bernabeu.
Trying to bring my Italian pal Roberto, a Rangers nut, down from the stratosphere as we walked the length of Viale Manfredo Fanti from the Stadio Artemio Franchi to the car after watching Nacho Novo sink Fiorentina in a European semi-final.
Manchester 2008, for all its disorder, was a rites-of-passage event for Ibrox fans. As was Seville in 2003 for Celtic supporters. Unforgettable occasions.
After years of ambivalence, I’d rather like my own kids to know of all this now. To feel it, understand it, just as I did with my old man’s tales of dodging flying bottles at Old Firm games.
I’d like them to invite me along, too. I never thought I missed it, that terracing culture which still has such a sway on so much of this little country, but I realise I do now that it is no longer here.
We need to be with other people and portals to journey through with like-minded souls, forging friendships and creating shared histories. Football is one of the best and this must be harnessed and championed when we return to the light.
Whatever the product that remains and however things seem right now, going to the game will be something to cherish more than ever when this is over. Louder, brighter. A reaffirmation of what it is to be human and together.