Games Without Frontiers by Joe Kennedy

Author:Joe Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Games without Frontiers
ISBN: 9781910924259
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2016-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

Newcastle 0 – Arsenal 1

29 DECEMBER 2013

The three-carriage train was standing room only by the time it pulled into Newcastle Central. Arsenal were in town, but the passengers boarding from North Yorkshire onwards were all going to support the home team, who had enjoyed an impressive run of results in the lead-up to Christmas, putting them just outside the top four. For Newcastle, it was the season’s biggest game so far, an encounter which would set them against the club who had made the early running for the Premier League title. My stepfather, in one of those strokes of luck that seem to happen to people in the building trade, had been offered the loan of two season tickets by a couple of friends, and he’d invited me to come and step outside my footballing comfort zone for an afternoon.

In the UK, it’s still the case that, aside from the pantomime, going to the football is one of the few things you can do in the irregular and formless store-cupboard time between Christmas and New Year if you want to retain a handle on your social being. Otherwise it’s just the traces and intimations of that: the use-the-year-up gatherings, the china-clinking visits, the bleary conversations in the supermarket when you nip in to buy milk. As the calendar runs down, people actually seem to become less concerned with clock-time and more willing to embrace or experience a purer kind of duration structured only by shifts in the intensity of inactivity. Sport is one of the few ways in which this is contradicted.

In any given year the period between 26th December and 1st January has a busy sporting schedule, with race meets and rugby padding out the already clotted football fixture list. With the transfer window creaking open, managers point to it as a justification for replenishing their squad. It’s also the period used to gauge what should be anticipated for the remainder of the season: teams who have started strongly often show cracks in the festive season, while others seem to be stirred by it. Famously, it’s a time for results which counteract the logic of the – perhaps proverbial – form-book, a dangerous little spell in which league leaders might collapse at home against a side in the relegation places, inevitably provoking speculation about how players spend their break (an attendant myth suggests some players judiciously pick when to be booked or sent off, so they’ll be suspended and therefore unavailable for selection over Christmas).

So, there is something very particular about football in late December. First, it is an odd patch for results. Second, it falls out of line somewhat with the organisation of work-time. Fans seem to look forward to it for both of these reasons, enjoying both the unpredictability and the sense that, here, football is not a reward for work, a pay-off, but something which stands in excess of a reward and is imbued with a suggestion of the gratuitous.

I certainly felt gratuitous. It was my

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