Sport
My First Football Match
By ROBERT ROBINSON
THE man beside me was a sup- porter of Chelsea. He kept saying, very loud : 'Come on, you blues.' First he said it in a tone which combined encouragement with confidence, as if he knew they'd do well even if he didn't shout. But when a man kicked the ball close to his own goal, he stepped up the encouragement and damped down the confidence. He became desperate in a bit and his tone became coercive. It was as if his mother had done something unbelievably un- motherly. Finally he said, close to the end of the game, and in a voice which made you know that the words meant the exact opposite of their dic- tionary meaning: 'Come on, Chelsea, you're playing like champions.' Very slow, very contem- plative, but worldly.
I was in the two shilling spot, which means you stand. I thought my feet might ache, but they didn't. I wasn't looking forward to half-time, 1 thought I'd envy the players having oranges and lemons in the dressing-room, but as it turned out I was sufficiently excited not to think about it. The man next to me thought I knew as much about things as he did, and when they flashed up scores from other grounds on a notice board at one end of the stadium, he turned to me and said 'Arsenal three down at half-time,' and I said 'Crikey!'
I don't like a crowd of people, especially when I think they're there to criticise a minority, like two football teams. But if anyone thinks football crowds are anything like television audiences— passive, and with all the passive man's envy of the active man he blames his passivity on—they're wrong. They were full of a highly critical appre- ciation, and not miserly with it,•either : when the opposite centre-half kicked a goal with the sort of elegance it's so hard to bring off when you are involved in doing something really important against tremendous odds, the whole ground clapped like mad and the Chelsea supporter next to me shouted out 'Oh!' When he said 'Oh!' he was more full of pleasure than I have seen anyone.
Both sides wanted to win the game, yet at the same time they seemed only to want to be ade- quate—each man in his own position—as the psychologists say we all ought to be. But when my friend started shouting out 'Come on, you blues' in the tone which suggested he didn't think they had a cat's chance in hell of coming on, Chelsea knew they were beaten and their skill went away, just like the skill of any man goes away when he thinks the boss has lost confidence in him.
I'm sure I don't know whether they were play- ing good football or not, but it was a treat to see. I could never imagine tactics working in foot- ball, but here the ball passed between the toes of three or four men and then entered the goal, and all as geometrical as if following dotted lines. I enjoyed the goalkeepers most of all. When the ball actually got through to them and they were hard put to it to stop it getting into the net, they'd field it, chuck it back up the field, and then they'd stare at the nearest member of their side and mouth things with their hands on their hips. They were obviously complaining about the ball being allowed to get near them. It occurred to me that it was only because there was always a chance of the ball getting past the players on the field that they had goalkeepers at all. So the attitude of the goalkeepers struck me as illogical.
I have a mental image of English footballers, and I imagine them in long homely shorts which come well past the knee. I was sorry to see both teams in those brief knickers which the continen- tal teams wear, and which are continental. I was sorry, too, to see a white ball. It was a bit too up to date, but I really mustn't complain. On the other hand, and irrationally, I didn't mind the four tall towers with batteries of searchlights on top which they turn on when the light starts to go.
These towers looked like Martians who had strolled over to see the game, and I credited the one standing directly behind the pavilion with a sly, critical look (there was something shrewd about the way only its upper half was showing). When the lights went on at the top of the towers, it was as if they had got serious—in the way people who look on casually to begin with do get serious. Perhaps they were imagining that the game on Mars was in its infancy. I had'a mac on, buttoned up to the neck, and a cap, and the rain came down occasionally in short, sharp showers. Standing there well buttoned up, in the crowd, there was the same feeling of impregnable comfort that you get when you lie in bed of a winter's night and there's a bit of a storm outside. The slope you stand on is high up, and there is a splendid view of the landscape beyond the stadium, shining ter- raced roofs, church spires, gasworks, trees, tele- phone wires : there was a splendid sky that day in Chelsea, the clouds pulled out into thin skeins like unspun wool, and the colour changing from a dark suicidal lemon to bright blue. The sun was out, but very stormy.
The referee ran with the upper half of his body parallel to the grdund, peering at the ball and the players' feet as if heCould—through some meta- physical microscope built into his unforgiving eye—spot the essential ball, the essential feet. The crowd thought he missed an offside or two, but I think he was doing his best, I would have been judged by him. ' ' The crowd flocked out at the end of the game and seemed satisfied. Not like crowds coming out of a cinema who look 100 per cent. less fitted for dealing with things than they did when they went in, but just the opposite. Put it another way, they seemed to have enjoyed themselves.
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