Cod Almighty | Diary
The first time as tragedy, the second time as tragedy also
9 August 2024
Your A46 Diary popped along the length of the eponymous road last week and had a stay in Stratford upon Avon, spending a pleasant few days embraced in sunshine, touristy Shakespearian tat and all things theatre. Coming home to wall-to-wall footage of riots and "protests" in the run up to the new season was quite the culture shock.
In Shakespeare's tragedies the tragic hero, a decent guy at the start of the play, will make mistakes that lead to him suffering from hubris, a feeling of invulnerability, a sense of power so potent and intoxicating that the character will feel that they can take on the gods themselves. This, of course, leads to a spectacular failure, a downfall of the kind that is richly deserved and leaves the audience with its catharsis, and seeing these chaps in the dock this week with tears in their eyes and apologies on their lips has reminded me of the satisfyingly inevitable fall of all things evil.
Of course, it is the repetition of the elements of tragedy that make the genre so recognisable. We're never going to run out of power-hungry, jealous, over-zealous, rash young men, so while the far right has exposed itself again, just as it has done every couple of decades or so, and at the sight of its face the usually silent majority has registered its disgust, those attitudes will not disappear, but will, like flies in the winter, await the time when Farage types present them with another of their spring times ((sing along) for Hitler and Germany!), once again showing that satisfaction will always be a fleeting thing.
Football grounds have long been recruitment places for agitators but for a lot of years now we’ve been spared the raised fists and the call for "White power!" in the Pontoon. I remember one chap many years ago, fair haired, charismatic, clearly an out-of-towner, turning heads as he loudly complained about the skin colour of the players on the pitch. Somehow, he got away with being escorted out; the stewards had him but let him go again. He was very chuffed, fist in the air, shouting nonsense. He got some ragged cheers and a guy who I used to know told me he had a point.
Despite the reduction of overtly racist and prejudicial language in recent years, football fans have long been seen as barely capable of controlling themselves in emotionally heightened situations. There is an assumption that hubris is somehow built into the average football fan, that tragedy lurks around the corner of every stand: get them somewhere near a match and their inner-Macbeth is ready to kill. One of the purported punishments for this summer's rioters will be footballing banning orders and the connections in the wider public will click into place as their assumptions about football fans are once again "proven" correct.
Animals, the lot of them. That's a tag applied to many different groups over the years, and for football fans it comes back with a regularity that tells us the need for folk devils is as strong as it ever was. Most demonising occurs when folk who are supposed to be placid and acquiescent raise their heads, their voices, their fists, make some kind of move out of the position allotted to them. Calling them animals goes some way to putting them back in their place.
Much of this can therefore be brought back to our long cherished social hierarchies and how neatly we force groups into the various strata and place ourselves above them. The accepted view of a football fan is still that they are working class and that these men (it’s always men in the mind's eye) are acting out, flexing muscles that are supposed to be covered until required by their betters. Your A46 Diary could almost sympathise with the leaders in football as they try to price the working class out of live football and the middle classes occupy more and more of the seats in the stadia. Will the mind’s eye picture of the fan change? Will we be able to demonise the fans at Chelsea and Arsenal? In the Premier League do we already let them off as individual bad apples rather than label the whole barrel as rotten? The grounds of the lower leagues might be the last places where the working-class still gathers en mass and so we can expect to see and hear a lot of comment on the correlation between football fans and rioters, between football fans and thugs, between football fans and all the tragedies that befall this otherwise utopian society.
Tomorrow, we can, hopefully, forget about all that for a couple of hours as the season kicks off at Fleetwood. Jordan Davies is finally confirmed on a season-long loan deal and the other fishes were relegated last season, so let’s hope we can take advantage of a hangover in the early part of their season.