Chanting from the Brink

As I sit here on the precipice of the unthinkable, 90 minutes away from football’s equivalent of the Armageddon, the peak of St. James Park is only a brief shard woven into my view of the sky-line. I can see a single glistening jut of its metallic upper tendons, but like the tip of an iceberg, the sight betrays far more than that.

Built beneath is an endangered colossus that first took my breath away 15 years ago. Walking out into the belly of football, I expected to see it first but you never do – you feel it, a smack in the face. Air-shorn lungs bellowing tides of anticipation, rippling across and through you from every angle as you take dizzily to your seat. The awesome spectacle of uniformity, and in those days, Keegan’s heroes appearing as an echo of them all, minature men you’d pretended to be in the park.

A girlfriend asked me once: why do you bother with something that makes you so upset? She’d come along after the golden years, after The Entertainers, after even Sir Bobby’s fleeting renaissance. And I could see it through her eyes: the dejected slump, the bitter rebukes, the Sunday spoilt by melodrama. What a futile cause.

But football is and always has been a futile cause for all but the lucky few whose birth (or insincerity) gives them Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal. The Premier League is a microcosm of the fucked-up world we inhabit in which all the wealth, all the power and all the happiness has been distributed among a disproportionate few who have developed insurmountable methods of protecting it. Manchester United are America (quite literally now, of course): on top, out front, smug in their greatness and loathed for it across the world, while the remaining three might constitute the jostling superpowers of Europe. So what does that make Newcastle FC? A shell-seasoned and cowering corner of the Middle East, pulling its self to pieces while the rest of the world grows.

By the end of the day, relegation may have finally been all but conceded by the slowest, flattest, most dim-spirited Newcastle side of at least the last twenty years, in a stadium that is still the fourth biggest in the country. Another question bemused outsiders ask is simply: how did it get to this? Even they remember vaguely a period in the 90s when the club were England’s Girls Aloud rather than its Pete Docherty.

Pin-pointing the exact moment when we became an injured moth declining deliriously toward the relegation carpet is difficult: some would cite Bobby Robson’s unceremonious departure, some Kenny Daglish dismantling the squad before him, some would even go as far back to say it was King Kev himself doing away with our youth team and teasing us with false economy-glory.

For me, the rot truly set the moment, in the middle of a build-up toward the Aston Villa goal, Lee Bowyer’s fist connected with Keiron Dyer’s face in front of an astonished St. James’ Park in 2005. Two team mates brawling mid-match. The national press have been poking us in the ribs and laughing ever since, and who can blame them.

So why bother with an interest that for almost a decade has been a merry-go-round stopping alternately at shame, disappointment, anger and, at times, sheer horror?

Because your football club is, in many ways, your oldest friend. You’ve known it for longer than you can quite remember and you’re loyal to it, even when it’s acting like an insufferable twat. When something is so entwined with your sense of self and history, there’s very little it could actually do that would make you wash your hands of them. This is the humanity from which football’s vultures tear their lumps: loyalty vitiated by a £40 shirt.

But beyond that, football and sport in general offer humankind something wonderfully unique. It is a world in which we can revel in the excesses of irrational emotion, joys greater than joys and sorrows deeper than sorrows, because ultimately, it is a game with no real bearing on our health, our families, or our futures. It is a world in which a good result is a good result, plain and untainted by the grey tones of life in which both a blessing and a curse are manifest somewhere in every event. For every hammer blow like relegation, there is a moment even in a bad performance, a well-timed pass or a neat one-two, than momentarily illuminates the sublime, a fleck of art amidst a chaos of movement that reminds you precisely why you bother. And most importantly, even for those of us struggling in football’s developing world, there is hope. Against the odds, despite the run of play, in football you never quite lose that little part of you that believes that this could be our match, our season.

Bill Shankley is claimed to have said once that football isn’t a matter of life or death – it’s much more important than that. Perhaps his point was that what matters more than our mortality is what we do with our lives – the bit in between that is so easy to let pass us by. Strange though it might seem to the rational outsider, the dizzy heights and choking lows of football feed directly into an essential appetite for life, and make it taste, if not better, then stronger.

Let’s hope the boys manage to put on a spread for us tonight, and keep the hope alive a little longer.