The international break sees many Premier League fans taking
the chance to watch some real football. A literary accompaniment to your grass
roots game might come from Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football
by Daniel Gray. It’s a great read and what Gray gets over is that for all the
crass commercialisation of modern football, there are still many pleasures that
remain eternal.
His list of fifty football delights include the pleasures of
seeing floodlights illuminating a ground in a strange town on a winter’s night,
of talking to an old man about football and watching his eyes glaze over as he
becomes young again remembering some icon of the 1950s, and of striking up a
football conversation at some cousin’s ill-timed wedding.
Gray relishes the quirky side of football, seeing a ground
from the train; how hitting the bar seems to bring so much promise to a
performance; how crowds love to jeer a pass that goes straight out of play;
stubby physiotherapists racing each other on to the pitch to treat their
injured stars after a crunching block tackle; seeing a team bus on the motorway
and listening to the results in the car. Gray muses about the characters that
inhabit catering vans and watching disparate fans gather at a junction station where hope and dread mingle.
He particularly enjoys scorelines in brackets. If a side has
scored 7 (seven) it elicits a strange sympathy for the humiliated opposition: “We
enjoy the horror, but we also try to put ourselves in the shoes of the
bracketed supporters. Are they pig-sick distraught or giddy at the gallows?
Throwing scarves in service station bins or sinking delirious pints somewhere
warm? Convinced of relegation, or starting to imagine a tight back-to-basics
one-nil win next Saturday?”
Daniel Gray can wheel away in triumph, to use one of his favourite bits of footballese. Saturday, 3pm is a
beautifully-written book and a worthy addition to your pre-match routine.
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