Seeing the joy that football still gives my father in dark times is sure proof we should never tinker too much with its beautiful simplicity
MOST years, the end of the football season comes as a welcome relief, a timely change of pace, an invitation to enjoy summer’s blossom, take the sea air and leave the fruity fug of pyro smoke, beer fumes and people shouting at each other behind for a little while at least.
Not this year, though. Not now that football has become the best, most effective way to communicate and share experience with my father. To the degree that, just five days on from the curtain dropping after Scotland’s Nations League win over the mighty Armenia, we feel really quite lost without it.
Ours is not the time-honoured tale of childhood trips to watch our team, the sights, the smells, the macaroon bars and the national obsession allowing us to overcome our emotional incapacity as Scottish males and express our feelings for 90 minutes. Truth be told, we attended very few matches in each other’s company.
Our bonds were formed and consolidated by darts in the back lobby leading to playing for steak pies in the pub, snooker in the miners’ club, putting greens, word puzzles and the annual pilgrimage to the Cheltenham Festival, later replaced by the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe when
Ours is the story of how football has endured now all that is gone
ever-increasing popularity made the frivolity of Chelters feel too much like a game of sardines.
Goodness me, those heady days at Longchamp for the Arc. Happy hour on the Rue Mouffetard. Being so skint at Beauvais Airport after doing the dough on Deep Impact that we only had enough for a can of orange between us. Tig with legendary trainer Francois Doumen’s grandchildren. The old boy thinking he’s Sacha Distel after three glasses of red.
Oh, yes, and boxing our way out of what turned out to be a most mean-spirited house of ill-repute after foolishly accepting a 2am lift to Creteil from a complete stranger on the street went ever so slightly south.
Rather, ours is the story of how football, which we largely watched and enjoyed together on telly, has endured now all that is gone. How its beautiful simplicity remains, and shall always be, its greatest gift. The thing that makes it the most special and universal game of all.
My father, you see, suffered a severe, devastating stroke in November 2020. It destroyed the left side of his brain, wiped out all the language centres, left him paralysed. The doctors weren’t sure he would see out the week. He had a chest infection, couldn’t swallow, wouldn’t take the feeding tube.
Then, after three weeks on a drip, he sat up and started eating carrot cake. And he continues to eat carrot cake now, one of the pleasures still available in a life in which so many have been denied.
Of the cruel hands dealt, the harshest, no doubt, is that my father remains unable to speak, read or write. Global aphasia, they call it. Hampered by those first three months in which Covid prevented any hospital visitors, we simply haven’t been able to help him construct those new neural pathways he needed and the window of opportunity now feels closed.
The daily routine of the newspaper crossword is just a memory. His once-voracious appetite for crime novels forgotten. His first love of horse-racing simply too complex to enjoy given the need for studying form, placing bets and tracking odds while keeping his wedge, his float, safely hidden from the old dear in that old leather wallet in the wardrobe.
Often, you would swear he is following the conversation avidly. Yet, that has to be tempered by the warning from the speech therapist, who long ago stopped visiting, that his nods and noises may just be ‘learned responses’, an instinctive awareness given the flow and tone of others that it is his turn to make some kind of contribution.
She would put several pieces of fruit in front of him, ask him to pick up the apple and he simply couldn’t do it. Couldn’t connect the word with the object. Couldn’t offer any kind of building block for a therapist to even begin working on or use as a valid reason to come back. It was so distressing to witness. And it makes life difficult and frustrating now.
Yet, my dad knows Rangers, knows the Scotland national team and still loves watching them — along with any other game that happens to be available. When he first came home from hospital, the realisation he could still keep track of and enjoy football matches offered one thread back to the days before that morning he collapsed that we could hold onto.
And when I now look after him on a Monday and a Thursday to give my mother a break from 24-hour care, we put on the highlights recorded from the weekend or the midweek fixtures and, for that short period, be us again. With him, more importantly, being him. After everything.
Words don’t matter much — if at all — in that environment. There is a non-verbal lingua franca that exists between enthusiasts. Those who have ever watched a match abroad — or in the company of someone with whom they do not share a common tongue — know this.
The shouts are the same. The sighs are the same. When a player misses a sitter, the expressions say it all. When a foul goes unpunished, the hands in the air and cries of anguish tell their own story. When the ball hits the net, the reaction, the grins, the yelps, are something primal.
We know what each other is saying in this context. No matter the words or sounds used. And this is why football is still a thing, a passion, that my father and I can share and hold onto in the absence of so much else from down the years.
Now the season is over, we still break out the Irn-Bru and the shortbread when I visit, but it’s not the same. There are silences after I’ve told him about how his grandkids are doing, unsure of how much he has understood. He might nod off. Never has the start date for the Premier Sports Cup — July 9, by the way — seemed so crucial to the fabric of a family home.
It has been an instructive period. One which has allowed us to see the unique qualities of football — and the many gifts it gives — from an unusual angle. To see that it can well be more, corny as it sounds, than just the most important of the unimportant things.
It has been a lesson in the game’s greatest strength: that unlike many other diversions, it is just so easy to follow. For all the rule changes and the tactical and technological developments, it is still just two groups of guys in different colours booting the ball up and down a bit of grass in a bid to put it in a net.
And it doesn’t need to be much more exacting than that. When IFAB announce, as they did this week, that there are new trials afoot — replacing throw-ins with kicks, for example — there is always that anxiety over them tinkering just too much with a thing that doesn’t need much improvement. Namely, that beautiful simplicity discussed earlier.
Beautiful because it still brings light and hope and joy in times of sometimes suffocating darkness. Beautiful because when his eyes light up after a goal — reminding us this is an arena in which we can still connect fully after all the trauma and confusion and pain — I see my dad happy, excited, himself. Just like before. And I love it. Almost as much as I love him.