I took my two children to the football yesterday. “Football?”, I hear you say. You are tuning in to this daily drivel to see if I have anything of value to say about golf (the jury is still out on that one), and the first sentence is about football. But bear with me, please. This is a bit like playing foursomes with me as your partner - you’ll need to be patient and trust that I am doing my best, although the strokes (or long, rambling sentences) might suggest otherwise at times.
When golfing, I am having to use the human body, which to judge from my own swing, when captured under the unforgiving glare of the modern video lesson, looks as if it were specifically designed for anything but hitting the ball; when writing, I have to flit between the app that is the modern, logical mind - with regular updates required - and our ancient lizard brain, hard-wired not for deep reflection but for urgent action in the face of real danger, not just Out of Bounds down the right. Anyway, these are my tools, and like any bad workman, I’m happy to blame them. If you bail out at this stage, I understand. I’ll mark it down as a No Return.
So, to the football. Both kids had been to a game or two before, up at Selhurst Park, where Crystal Palace play their home games, and those trips were meaningful for me, reminders of sacred childhood afternoons spent in the company of my father and the many loyal but profane followers of Cardiff City, then based at Ninian Park. Dad would buy us scalding hot Bovril drinks at half time and I would sit wide-eyed, soaking in every moment, pretty much in paradise. And as he never golfed, apart from a couple of holiday efforts in his late fifties, our trips to the football were to some degree a substitute for what some lucky families find on the golf course - multi-generational quality time spent watching or playing sport, in between the details of the rest of life. They were precious times.
But yesterday added a further layer of excitement for all three of us, for the visitors were Liverpool. I’ve been a Red even longer than I’ve been a golfer, and have stuck to that early association through thick and thin, just as I have to golf, although in golf I ought to say “fat and thin”, as anyone who has watched me pitched knows that “thick” doesn’t quite get to the heart of it. Further details of that affliction here.
I suppose these two youngsters didn’t really have much choice over who to support, given that Gerry and The Pacemakers’ anthem, as adopted by Liverpool fans the world over, will bring me to tears if it comes on the radio whilst driving to the tip, say, but I’ve not forced it on them. Just like with golf - if they decide they’d like to play, to share some afternoons on the back nine, or perhaps one day a road trip round the northern links, they’d make a nostalgic old fool very happy but there is no pressure either way.
I am understandably biased, however, given the sunk costs in both Liverpool and golf at this point, and while both sports elicit in me a slightly apologetic tone when explaining that I “follow” them, it would be a shame to not at least tell my children what these two things mean to me. I still suffer from my recollections of the 90’s fashion sense of golf, which not even Pringle themselves could pretend were ideal for the early days of courting; my competition preferring a grungier look of an evening.
Golf’s PR is lousy, but the average golfer is so obsessed with their wretched, persistent cut, and proclivity for three-putting no matter how close the approach finishes, that no one really has the time to spend reforming it. But at least, tartan caps and plus-fours notwithstanding, it’s not football, whose image is based not on the international game that entertains millions every week, but on minority hooliganism and outrageous players’ wages.
Try explaining to a non football fan the rationale for taking two impressionable children to what is effectively an advanced swearing course, learning from twenty-five thousand savants of the art of cursing, and you may find you struggle. Add into your explanation that you have paid handsomely for this experience, and you will find yourself in Dire Straits. Not literally, of course. They probably played the same venues, but their efforts at rock music would have washed away or perhaps drowned out all trace of the Anglo-Saxon seminar that we sat through yesterday.
But this is where the outsider to each sport is - perhaps fortunately for them, given the ongoing Stoic education in misery that both golf and Liverpool inflict - missing something in their one-dimensional view of these games. For in golf, as in football, there is something about the community that is precious. We are a tribal species deep down, and if you have not stood in the Kop before kick-off, and been part of a wave of hope and awful singing in the recital of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, I wish I could explain to you with words how emotionally raw that feels; how my chest heaves at this music that, if I were a Palace fan, would mean nothing. Tens of thousands of different people, from all walks of life, brought into a passionate unison for a few moments.
It is transcendent to me, as is golf at times, although never often enough to be predictable, or boring. But a similar interest in suffering exists in both; an acceptance that things will go wrong more often than they go right, but we will hang on in there for the rare times when Barcelona are humbled by a wave of momentum and a fast corner, or when Nicklaus eases on a sixth green jacket, wielding a humongous putter.
Plus there is another sort of language in football, as in golf, besides the seemingly limitless and inventive swearing. We speak of off-sides and free drops, and of panenkas and stymies. And while this just deepens the mystery for the non-acolyte, it adds another level of code and connection for the fanatics of either sport.
Anyway, assuming you’re still here, we went up to Palace yesterday. I misread the tickets, and was preparing for a leisurely lunch when a fellow Red kindly pointed out that the match kicked off at two, not three, but we got there, albeit hungry, with several seconds to spare. We’ve waited years to see our team together, rather than on the TV highlights, and there was great expectation in the days leading up to it, and in the hurried journey to the ground.
Seeing the action first-hand is different, somehow - three dimensional, I supppose. Van Dijk is impossibly commanding as he strides around a short pitch shot away from us, and Milner looks like some muscular Adonis warming up only a long putt (almost certainly the first of three putts, given that it is over twenty feet) from our seats in the lower tier.
We’re so used to reproductions of such occasions on screens large and small, and in the flesh the authenticity of these minutes seem positively vibrant by comparison. But Liverpool are not at their best, and despite an early brace of goals, they struggle to close off the game. A sluggish second half performance sees Palace claw one back, and threaten an equaliser, but a late penalty secures three points from a below par performance (funny how this “par” term gets reversed outside of golf…I am yet to experience what being below par feels like, but I bet it won’t entail the body language of the Reds after the break). And all three points are heading back in the vague direction of Hoylake…
This morning the football chat is all about the penalty, and how it was an outrageous decision that cost Palace any hope of a point after a whole lot of hard work, and I think about how the game itself has changed since I first watched it. The decision went to some mysterious, off-site third party for inspection, then VAR lobbed it back at the referee as the proverbial hospital pass (perhaps I’ll do a rugby edition one day).
The outcome would have been the same regardless of the decision - a whole load of people delighted, celebrating their tremendous bias with great enthusiasm, while another load of people scream at the injustice of life, victims of another footballing equivalent of the violent lip-out. It was ever the same at Ninian Park, and the binary drama of such moments is what makes football, and match play golf for that matter, so compelling to watch and play.
But for the poor referee, whose every decision is bound to find a mixed reception, it might give a glimpse of what we go through as golfers…triumph and disaster waiting round every dogleg. It also reminded me of something Alistair Cooke noted, in talking about the strange attractions of this golfing life. In many sports, you get a second chance as a player - but as a golfer “you are totally responsible for the fate of the little white ball and that you have only one chance of hitting it correctly (there is no second serve, no third strike, no fourth down, etc)”.
The recent application of technology has diluted this for the modern football referee, and yesterday the aptly named (for the red portion of the crowd at least) Kevin Friend was forced into a second look at a decision which eventually made him popular with about five percent of the crowd, and a sworn (lots of swearing at this point) enemy of the rest of them. At least in the old days at Cardiff they only had to make a decision once…
It’s a weird vibe, this - we enjoyed the experience, as expected, but such was the anticipation that it was unlikely to ever live up to our billing. We made some memories, and my children can say they’ve actually been to a Liverpool match now, which makes up for other areas of my parenting to my mind, but sometimes we grasp so hard at certain outcomes that we fail to catch the magic that lurks in the less obvious places. And as I write this, I think of the wonder I took from, on paper, less mouthwatering games - Cardiff knocking the then mighty Leeds out of the Cup, perhaps, or that 4-2 v Huddersfield when it snowed.
Before long I drift on to golf from this topic, as I tend to from most other topics, and reflect on the courses that somehow didn’t quite click for me on a given day - Colonial, Royal County Down, maybe even Pebble Beach. You build these things up so much that it becomes unrealistic for them to reach those heady, otherworldly expectations, and yet the real revelations are sometimes to be found in the golfing equivalents of those freakish afternoons at Ninian Park, when you least expect it. That first game at Pennard, perhaps, or the recent debut on the extraordinary landscape that is Cleeve Hill. And round the corner from Pebble, the following day, the muni Pacific Grove, where our match went down the 19th, laughing hard all the way.
I’m glad we went, and I will ask my children to read this so they have a record of how much it meant to me, and one day maybe they’ll do the same with their kids as Dad did with me, and the whole cycle can roll on as it must. But I have also come away with a renewed determination to look for the poetry that lurks in the less obvious places, in the second or third tier of golf courses, those unsung heroes. And in the football that takes place nearer the grass roots of this other beautiful game.
So I will cherish the odd game down at Woking FC, and at the pitch and putt round the corner, but keep one eye out for tickets to anywhere called Newcastle as well. For Royal County Down and St James’s Park both need a second look to me.
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