May. The Carabao, or those of us a tad old skool, League Cup Final is long gone. The FA Cup staggering its past-the-sold-by-date towards the Final, ditto the Champions and Rich Runners Up league. Up and down the divisions clubs have jostled their way to win promotion, staved off relegation or clung on to mid-table mediocrity. And for the few, not the many, the Premier League title. Before you know it, all this will be done ’n dusted ready for it to begin all over again, the 2019/20 edition.
What better time to reflect on the modern meaning of our much-fabled People’s Game? For a comic-strip insight mixing fine art with bittersweet commentary there’s none better than David Squires. David’s strips, 2014-2018, are now handily collected in one very tasty volume Goalless Draws. Stuart Roy Clarke is another who takes a visual approach to locating the lost meaning of football, this time though via a photography that he has made his own under the rubric ‘homes of football’. Stuart’s latest collection The Game combines the finest photographic record of the changes in football, with a superb accompanying text from the one of the founders of football’s academia, John Williams. Together they make for a superlative double act.
Part of Stuart and John’s argument, and the appeal of their book, is that there really is no substitute for ‘being there’. This is an experience that has changed markedly since the ’89 Hillsborough tragedy, a moment caught most poignantly by David Cain’s book-length poem Truth Street. For the most part those changes have been for the better, but no one can pretend that ‘being there’ is the same as it once was. It’s also a point expertly made by Duncan Hamilton in his new book Going to the Match – a journey to games which confirms that despite all the worst efforts of corporate homogeneity, the proverbial wind and the rain of 90-plus minutes in the stands cannot be beaten. What the modern ‘matchday experience’ (ugh!) has become is the effort to convert our fandom from active participants to passive consumers. Dave Roberts is having none of that in Home and Away, as he travels round non-league football to find a game largely untouched by the trappings of what has become disapprovingly known as ‘Mod£rn Football.’
