Bristol City 1894

It’s been quite a half. We have gone at it against Leicester City; the Leicester City, the overspent foxes, rampaging through the division on their way back to the premiership, surfing a wave of parachute payments and entitlement. They look ordinary. Choudhury is getting barracked by the away end. Mavadidi and Dewsbury Hall are regularly hailed as premier league players, on holiday for a season before heading back to the summit. Harry Winks played for England, as did Jamie Vardy. Right now, Jamie Vardy is being  abused by all three sides of the home end. It is consistent, it happens at every ground he goes to. At any moment Jamie Vardy could steal through and slice a scalpel into the heart of the fans, with his laser-like accuracy, his poise, his 38 year old balance, athleticism and shithousery on full display. He will go and cup an ear to the fans who thus far have been chanting ‘Your wife’s a grass”, over and over again, and he may point and someone in particular, with a grin that has remained unchanged since he banged in goals in the playground at Marcliffe Primary. It’s ok, it’s not one of the best chants I’ve heard this year, but it works. Imagine going to every ground, up and down the country, and have that shouted at you, week after week, by grown men and women. It’s certainly not overly offensive, or that difficult to explain. Actually, it’s really hard to explain to Penny and Elliot why Jamie Vardy’s wife is held up as a grass by 23,000 people, so I say something along the lines of ‘I’ll tell you later’. They know the chants always make a certain kind of sense, usually because I’m tittering to myself. They ask, “what are they singing?”, or in the case of the ubiquitous ‘he’s one of our own’ chant, “Dad, who is Jimmy Saville’? Actually, that was probably the most tricky one to describe. Well, kids, he was not a very nice man, kids, and he came from Leeds and he spent a bit too long in the mortuary. What’s a mortuary? I’ll tell you later. 

Half-time means we all go to the toilet, then Elliot and Penny run back through the crowds on the concourse so they can watch ‘the apple run’, where two ‘lucky’ competition winners get to roll a massive inflatable Thatcher’s apple across the turf, up to halfway and back again. The turf is super skiddy these days, a freshly-watered billiard cloth. Even in the most apocalyptic winter, the pitch never lapses back to the 70s, where mud was mud and grass was not there and the ball would stick, constantly. The kids love the apple run, it’s slapstick, a riot, vaguely overweight Dads being the most competitive they have been since their kids’ sports day all those years ago, where they ran for the first time in a long time only to find their body in a state of revolt, their achilles twitching like a brittle twig. They love seeing these men fall over, again and again. 

As I head back from the toilets – the shiny, clean, toilets, of which there are many, so unlike the windowless shoebox with two troughs of my youth spent watching Exeter City – I can sense an unusual hush. In fact, maybe toilets are one of the single biggest game-changers in contemporary football. A friend tells me of the days when Ashton Gate had one – ONE – lady’s toilet, somehow affixed onto the back of the East End stand, a filthy lean-to, blocked, with the contents rising up to greet you on entry. You would just hold it in, forever. It was near the away end, in those days a gentle terrace with no roof. Stand there in the persistent rain and wind. Now there are toilets everywhere. No-one pisses in a bottle and hurls it over the crowd, no-one pisses on the open terrace, onto someone’s shoes, into someone’s pocket. People go and they piss in the toilet, or at least near the toilet, not forgetting the fundamental inability of most men to actually piss into a toilet, preferring the floor and almost anywhere else to the foot wide aperture designed for their stream of uric acid and thatchers. 

But yes, as I head back, the concourse is full, people with pints,watching the screens, desperate to see if Wout Faes really did foul Tommy Conway and whether that should have been a penalty or not. But heading up to the stand is like travelling through a portal – something is different. There is none of the strange hum of noise, the swell of half-time, the dreadful music. All is silence, nothing, no noise, a moment’s utter quiet, then interrupted once, and with regularity, by a list of names. Elliot and Penny are sat at the front, arms through the railings, waiting for the fun to start. They look around, Penny mouths “what the hell?”, Elliot looks dazed, bereaved, even. Now I remember, it’s a new thing, they announced it earlier in the week. The half-time party is cancelled in favour of reading a list of anyone connected to Bristol City FC who died during the season. All of them, and there seems to be a lot, a heck of a lot. It feels like it should be serious, stentorian, but it has all the vibe of low-budget 9/11 memorial, minus the tragedy, it’s just a list of old people who died. I’m sad they died, but I’m more sad that the stadium has been reduced to a somnolent, deadened mass. Talk about a buzzkill – whose idea was it? I know, when the fans are finally behind us after 7 matches of utter footballing slurry, of tedium, the feeling that the ship is marooned, when we finally feel the delicious breath of wind and joy that football so often promises but rarely delivers, let’s read a list of dead people for 20 minutes. That’ll do it. The two chaps behind us look befuddled as we go back to our seats. What the hell is going on, says one. We start laughing. People are talking quietly, it hasn’t got quite the enforced reverence of a November silence, but people are nervous that the poppy police might be out again. You must be sad, you must be reverent, lest we forget, you must pay allegiance to the flag, to death, in life. Eventually the last name is read out and the game is ready to kick off. It feels like most people haven’t retaken their seats, they were hiding from the solemnities in the concourse where they could drink and ignore the constant lietmotif of death. We do not go to football to think about death, we go to football to think about football and to not think about anything else. 

Eventually, the football starts again, and we forget what we were supposed to be remembering. The first few minutes after the start of the second half the chant goes up, rolls around the Atyeo, Come on Leicester, Come on Leicester. It rolls along the Dolman stand and is grabbed hold of by Section 82, and reflect back, Fuck off Leicester, Fuck off Leicester. My kids know this one and they love it. It is second only to ‘Oh when the Saints go three nil down.” Penny asks, “Can we sing it, Dad?” and I say “No you cannot”. Other songs they know and can’t sing; “The Referee’s a wanker”, “Shit Referee”, “My old man said follow the Gas I said fuck off no you’re a cunt”, “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucking hell is that”, as well as several anti-Welsh songs, saved exclusively for Cardiff, Swansea, and any Welsh player, involving sheep, or what side of the bridge is best for shitting on.

We win, 1-0, thanks to Anis Mehmeti. On the way home I see my most recent book in the window of the local bookshop. We head to CanCan pizza and it is very nice. Saturday evenings are so much better when we win.