Football, Coming Home
“To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.” — J.B. Priestley, The Good Companions
It didn’t happen quite like I imagined, like I had been imagining for nearly eighteen months. When the Rockford Files played, I wasn’t wiping a tear from a corner of an eye and shouting encouragement to the boys in a voice cracking with emotion. I was just getting into the turnstile, after queueing for nearly half an hour. So the match was already underway when I found my seat and looked towards the pitch. I had never missed a kick-off in my life. It had to be this one, didn’t it?
But I was home. In the Kop stand at Prenton Park. A place where I’d wished to be hundreds of times since I last actually was. A place that — in the bleak depths of winter lockdown — I had to visit the outside of, just to make sure that it was still actually there.
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Tranmere Rovers have had three ‘permanent’ managers since that last match, a grim 0–0 draw with Bristol Rovers. ‘We’ have been demoted, then pushed for promotion straight back up, and played at Wembley. Otis Khan, Lee O’Connor, and Paul Lewis all came and went. My memories of them in a Tranmere shirt will always be two-dimensional. I had watched it all from living rooms and bedrooms, because it was marginally better than staring at walls. Football without fans really was nothing. A colossal, neon-lit nothingness.
Saturday was in beautiful 3D. There was Micky Mellon, like he never left, thumping his chest and raising a fist to his adoring Kop. There were LOTS of new players — in fact I’d only seen Joe Murphy, Peter Clarke, and Kieron Morris line up for us before, and in Murphy’s case, that was 21 years ago, when we were both young and full of potential!
But more than any of that, it was about us, the Super White Army. It was about catching up with mates. It was about limbs. On some level, dare I say it, it was undoubtedly about roaring defiance at the twin curses of Covid-19 and politicians who were and are happy to “let the bodies pile high in their thousands”. It was about the utterly preposterous proposition that is supporting Tranmere Rovers Football Club at the best of times, never mind the very worst.
Callum McManaman scored, following bravura work down the left by the promising Chris Merrie. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, as the goalscorer, plus Feeney, Clarke, Spearing, and Dacres-Cogley piled on top of each other, extending arms to their limits, screaming a bug-eyed catharsis, bonding with fans in a way that had been impossible for far too long. The Kop screamed back. I myself let out an animalistic bellow that I didn’t know I was capable of. Eighteen months of hurt, released. Then the tears came to those eye corners.
We’re back.
