Why we can't stop loving what we despise.
Separating ourselves from interests and obsessions that we have come to objectively view as having lost some value is much harder than it might seem.
’But how are we supposed to feel about a league where in 11 of the past 15 seasons, the title has been won by two teams either convicted or accused of cheating. With, as yet, no sanction or non-sanction on trophies won or points gathered?’ - Barney Ronay in The Guardian.
It’s 1991 and I’m with my oldest friend Martin, watching West Ham play a cup game at Upton Park.
West Ham score and go two-up, my excitement gets the better of me and, in my enthusiastic celebration, I knock the right lens out of Martin’s spectacles.
While writing this piece, and keen to get my facts straight, I message him,
‘Sorry to bring it up again but, which game were we at when I knocked the lens out of your glasses?’
‘It was when we beat Luton 5-0. goals 3,4 & 5 were all blurry due to your thuggery.’
A conversation we’ve often had in more recent years centres on why the inept performances of a team comprised of millionaires with whom we have the very loosest affinity, still hurt.
I despise the soulless vessel of corporate greed that professional football has become. It bears no apparent relationship to the game I fell in love with as a child, and yet something keeps me in its thrall.
Growing up, I lived in a house full of conflict. Both my parents were kind and thoughtful enough individuals, but putting them together created an alchemy transforming them both into much worse versions of themselves.
Now, and in the context of the numerous diagnoses for neurodivergence within our family, it’s clear that my father was autistic. My mother found him impossibly hard to live with, even if she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why.
I liked my father, but he was impossible to get close to and couldn’t show love, which can easily manifest to a child as ambivalence, or worse. Our fragile connection built on sporadic things we did together, one of which was going to the park to kick a football about.
Playing football got me out of the house, and gave both my parents respite from the rows that would erupt when my father inevitably did something to annoy my mother, unless things got so bad that he would go out and sit in his car listening to the radio or reading a book for an extended period.
Sometimes, a friend would call at my house and tell me they’d seen my dad just sitting in his car and that he’d been there for hours. I would mumble some excuse to hide my shame.
Football was comfort, a stabilising and predictable escape from what often felt like an impossibly oppressive and upsetting atmosphere.
A mini snooker table I’d be given for Christmas one year was almost immediately repurposed into a large 5-a-side pitch for my table football teams, and I’d devise intricate competitions, keeping meticulous records on each match in a series of school exercise books.
As a child, I collected anything and everything football related. Cards, Panini stickers, the world cup coins you got free at the Esso petrol station. I amassed a vast collection of football magazines, football programmes, and pored over the football strips in my favourite comics.
My mother, a district nurse working with the geriatric, would invariably arrange for me to go to one of her patient’s houses to watch the cup final on their colour TV, because we didn’t get one until 1976. This was a treat, not least because there would almost certainly be cake involved.
All of this seems so far away now, not just because of the decades that have passed but also the loss of simplicity and magical disorder the game once represented. How nice it would be to watch a match on a pitch so muddy you can no longer see the lines or the colours of the payers shirts.
The conflict at the centre of loving something that has become largely despicable, and the consequent feelings of deep loss that others find impossible to understand is what psychologist Kenneth Doka calls, ‘disenfranchised grief’. It’s a sadness society doesn’t fully recognise because it’s not conventional. Nobody sends a condolence card because modern football has been ruined by sovereign wealth funds, or because music or movies that contributed to the way you perceive yourself turned out to be created by an abuser.
My attachment to football developed as somewhere safe and predictable to put myself, to return to. Growing up in an atmosphere of instability, secure attachment to my parents always felt impossible. I lived in a constant state of anxiety that my mother would leave us, exhausted by her constant frustration with my father and his inability to connect, so it made sense to find something else that offered those qualities.
As an AuDHD person, football served as an easy route to connection without expectation, a universal language meaning I could be with others without really showing any of myself, relieving me of the need to pretend to be someone that I wasn’t.
When I grew up, playing football for the local pub team was a chance to belong, with clear boundaries and roles, removing the ambiguity of social interaction. I had no wider relationship with any of those men, but I recall details about them vividly.
Colin Sands, who played at right back, came in one morning with a badly bruised face. We assumed he’d been in a fight, but it turned out that he’d hired a bouncy castle for his child’s birthday and, when all the kids had gone home, Colin decided to have a go himself and went at it so ferociously that his knee reared up and smashed him in the face, breaking his own nose.
I was in my late teens when I first watched the Woody Allen movie, ‘Manhattan’, a story about a neurotic middle-aged man’s love affair with a teenage girl.
These days, through the prism of all that is known, assumed and been written about Woody Allen, it’s become uncomfortable to express any sort of fondness for his work, which triggers the familiar question about whether it’s possible to separate an artist from their art. But often, this is a mistaken comparison, because what we’re really trying to wrestle with is the way that art becomes ingrained in our sense of identity.
That Woody Allen movie served as a mirror reflecting back at me feelings and thoughts I experienced but was unable to articulate and would not describe or understand with any clarity for many more decades.
Whether it was the complexity of understanding and navigating human relationships, the recognition of ones own neuroticism and how it might impact those around us, or the incongruent appearance of a seemingly indestructible ego when it was laughably unjustified, everything resonated with me in a way that stories, until that point, had not.
This film was not something I simply consumed, it was serving a function in the space between how I thought of myself and who I actually was, and I found that it left me feeling less alone.
If you are of a certain age, you may feel the same conflicted way about Michael Jackson. You might despise his behaviour, but carry within you powerful memories of your younger self listening to ‘Thriller’ in 1982, and be understandably unable to extricate yourself from deep association with his music. I know I am, because I was at a party that year at Martin Pengelly’s house when someone put ‘Beat It’ on, at which point I decided it would be a good idea to get someone to carry me upside down on their shoulders and, whilst I was freaking out to the music, I cut my head open on a door latch and ended up in A&E with so much blood on my white grandad shirt it looked as if I’d been cast in a horror movie.
Art and the experiences that have shaped us exist in the space between the judgement we might attract for our continued support or the discomfort we’d feel at an incongruent rejection of it.
When something once held up as good implicates us in wrongdoing, it can feel morally injurous, even though we are not complicit, and the disenfranchised grief we feel at the painful loss of a part of us not fully understood or acknowledged by others can be hard to bear.
In psychology, the term ‘splitting’ refers to a cognitive defence mechanism where a person or object is perceived as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the combination of the two in one entity feeling too emotionally overwhelming. Shamed for our unbreakable connection to a sport that has become a byword for greed and excess, or deep affection for music or film that relates so closely to formative memory but is now associated with despicable behaviour, we cannot choose, how could we? Instead, we are forced to accept that good and bad necessarily exist alongside one another, inextricably linked.
Paradoxically, whilst we might be ridiculed or judged for expressing sadness at a football result, or enjoying art made by individuals who have been exposed for committing terrible crimes, continued love for something that has value far beyond what is immediately obvious, even if it has deeply disappointed us, is a sign of emotional integration, the antithesis of splitting, and indicative of psychological maturity.
West Ham were relegated to a lower division recently and, in the wake of the disappointment, Martin and I exchanged messages of faux optimism that, we might yet still see them back in the top division before we die.
In the quiet of my car, every time I drive across the Dartford Bridge, I glance over towards East London.
The most visible buildings are those that have risen up with the growth of the city and the decline of the game. The Shard, One Canada Square, and the Canary Wharf complex.
But I’m looking toward the old Upton Park football ground, long since replaced by a block of flats.
I’m remembering all the times I spent there, completely invisible but feeling a part of something without any need to be someone, and how although the presence of other people can sometimes be the cause of loneliness, it can also be its antidote.
As I reach the apex of the Dartford Bridge, I sing out with gusto, to nobody, ‘Come on you Irons’, a chant from the terraces. A familiar feeling rises up in my chest, and I’m smashing the lens out of Martin’s glasses all over again.
This week on ‘Sideways’ we’re identifying ‘Ten things you shouldn’t say to someone in recovery’. There’s also a a buffalo that looks like Donald Trump and an exploding wheelchair. What more could you want?
That’s it for this week. Thanks for being here, I appreciate you.
I feel exactly the feelings you've described about my country, which used to be America.
Angel Delight. Nah. Great essay.