Some nights are magical. It's a cliche above all cliches to talk about football as the opera or ballet of the working class, but when you see your team sweeping down the pitch and take in the nimble footwork, the seemingly telepathic connection between them, the grace and balance of the movement, the spatial awareness and the incredible improvisation, responding to an ever changing circumstance, then, it's tempting to say 'ballet is crock of shit, because no one tries to stop you dancing and the crowd don't shout at you whilst you're doing it' and football is way better than that and that cliche is some sort of snobbish effort at humouring a working class pursuit and in fact, ballet isn't upper class football, it's just not really anywhere near as good and football is just football and a deep and meaningful pleasure that stands for itself regardless of any attempt to bracket it within a particular social strata.
I don't know if this was a magical night for Reading fans. I suspect not. Their team turned up, knocked it about quite prettily for 30 minutes in a style not unreminiscent of what we called 'Critchball' and forgot that the point of the game is to kick the ball towards the goal in the hope it goes past the goalkeeper.
It's also hard not to overlook the fact that this might be one of the final games of football played by Reading FC. They might be a fake QPR and just a small town in Slough and all of that, (I'm not sure there even is much Reading based banter, such is their externally perceived status as 'inoffensively bland FC') but it's mind blowing to think that, just as we bellow out 'We love you Blackpool, we do,' their band of about 250 fans are trooping out, possibly on a countdown to the end, facing an unknown future. It's even more mind blowing to know that, seen as we've been in a (different but) similar position ourselves, that nothing appears to have changed since then and that clubs that have existed for a century or more, clubs with heritage (no, really, they had Jimmy Quinn once, that counts) and belong to a place and people can be snuffed out because no one, still, seems capable of doing anything about owners that display the kind of irresponsible, psychopathic indifference to their fellow man and for whom a football club is nothing more than an adult version of a childhood toy to be broken and abused and then discarded.
I'll be honest, I wasn't thinking that at full time. I was completely indifferent to the fate of Reading FC. I was simply leaning into the noise, ruminating on how, it's not how many people are there, but what sort of mood they're in that matters. Reflecting on how well we'd played, watching how happy the players looked and letting 'Sonny Carey baby!' go round and round and round in my head (have I ever mentioned that I rate Sonny?) like some kind of joyful earworm.
We love you Blackpool. We do. As it rings around Bloomfield Road I think how this simplest of songs has got its own magic. It's the most old fashioned of chants. It's something we sung when I started going and I suspect long before that. It's the sort of thing we seem to reserve for the more special wins, the moments that make it worthwhile. Tonight made me feel that all the drab draws and disappointing defeats are worth it. It made me float down Bloomfield Road to the car, it made me smile as I drove home. It made me wake my boy up to chant the new Sonny song at him when I got there. He told me I was an embarrassment for a 45 year old and to go to bed. I didn't care. Few things in life make me feel this good. The drugs don't work, beer is boring after so many years, opera is a screechy racket... Football admittedly doesn't do this very often, but fuck me - when it's good... it's good.
---
It didn't start out like it ended though. I wasn't all together optimistic. The squad is too thin, the gap is too big. We never turn up after a big win, we're rubbish on midweek nights. All these thoughts competed in my head with the impishly twinkling idea that 'we just might...' - I reconciled it all by settling for the mundane and pragmatic 'we'll see' as the attitude of the day.
What we saw for about 30 minutes was a Pool side looking a bit laboured. The touch was off. We couldn't seem to press them. Niall Ennis grafted hard but nothing ran for him. Sonny had the main chance, but smashed it at the near post when a cut back seemed the wiser choice. Robbie Apter had a couple of incredible runs and delivered a few great balls, but ran just as often into traffic. Hayden Coulson seemed weirdly shot shy and Reading knocked it about smoothly and almost imperiously and things got a little restless. Bloomfield Road on around 20 minutes bears no resemblance to the ground at full time.
Then something clicks... Coulson, all slicked hair and skinny greyhound reaching for the rabbit effort finally does find a shot and it's deflected just wide. We string together a real period of play. We can't find a way though but it's full of promise. The drum beats, the crowd sing 'du du duuu... d-d-d-duuuu' (another ancient classic) and there's a rhythm to the night. This isn't the fancy arpeggios of an orchestra performing a dance score, it's the sound of a football team slowly finding it's rhythm and clicking into gear and it's one upon which I begin to drift away into some kind of dreamlike reverie. Interspersed with the melody and beat are howls of anguish as the final ball is just not quite right or the run not quite alert enough and cries of outrage as the referee makes some inexplicable decisions. We're singing songs we've sung for as long as I remember and the game is following a timeless path - building anticipation, frustration and a sense of injustice.
---
Halftime. I'm not sure what to say. We've been quite good for the latter part of the half but not very good for the first bit. It's always tempting to say 'put Bloxham on' but apart from that... I don't know. We'll see.
---
The second half starts with a bang. Sonny is away and these days, when he's away, you almost certainly know he's going to get a shot in. There was a time when you could practically see his head whirring with phrases like "ball retention" and "retain possession" and other such coaching mantras but it's like Steve Bruce has performed a cleansing ritual on the lad and returned him to the kid he was, the one who like football and was good at it because he scored goals and did good stuff, not simply recycled possession in obeyance of what had been drilled in training day after day after day. He drills a low shot, their keeper, not for the last time tonight, makes a good save. The crowd is up...
Then Niall Ennis who has had a difficult night gets a touch on a loose ball. He's a menace is Ennis but he's got a bit of the gnasher about him, tangling with strikers, always on the stretch or the slide, never letting the defender rest and he pokes it to Fletcher who accelerates with that remarkable sudden change of pace he has and then, as you think he might shoot, he lays it to Sonny and the boy wonder finds the most precise of finishes you possibly could find, threading it from an oblique angle with needle sharp precision, the ball kissing the fabric of the side netting and sending Bloomfield Road into rapture.
Rapture is, though, only stage one. Mania is to come. Lee Evans with a regulation loopy Lee Evans ball in, fizzing and curling. Ennis comes across and the ball kind of bounces off him, but then Casey, still up from a corner, slides in opportunistically and pokes it home. The place could fall down now and we'd just carry on cheering in the rubble. Belief is ignited. I wasn't daring to hope, I was waiting to see and they've shown me in no uncertain terms that they believe, the quickfire double destroying any thought that this might be bridge to far or the challenge in front of them to big.
I just want to list songs now. We run through a set of anthems and though it's half empty, the stands reverberate. This is my favourite thing on earth.
Carey then has a run that I could relive forever, his quick feet at the start make me think of a kid leaping across rocks on the seafront, all momentum and balance, all fearlessness and self belief, the run that follow is direct, it's like watching tissue paper burn as the defenders melt away in an instant, Carey the flame, them the ash in his wake, the shot at the end a cannon fired from the deck of the navy's flagship. Their keeper again though, is not sunk, saving at full stretch and then, remarkably, rising again, swaying on the tidal wave of Pool pressure, but somehow stopping Fletcher at virtually point blank range.
This is what we do this for. Fuck everyone else. This is why we do it. We send on CJ - he's deployed perfectly, just stretching the defence and doing CJ stuff. We send on Bloxham. He does everything but score. One run is languid as Sonny's was full on energy, but he's just so deceptive that the defender ends up bamboozled and he's jogging in, but again, Pereira makes a stunning stop, seeming to grab the ball from behind him, only to see Bloxham claim the rebound and then, as if in tribute to Ash Fletcher a few weeks back, clips the ball calmly and seemingly entirely deliberately over the top.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that he misses again, or that when in a similar position after hassling the defender, he smashes it right down the keeper's throat because as he does, the ball is kept alive by Silvera and then dropping into the box, finds Sonny Carey to lean back, cut over the top of it and lash it definitively home, sending this palace of breezeblock and faded seats beyond mania, to delirious injury time hero worship.
Right at the end, Reading have a shot. It hits the post. Maybe they should have tried doing that earlier? Who cares though. Not me.
---
We played magnificently in the second half. We were a unit, an attacking force, a side jangling with confidence and willing each other to express ourselves. I'm going to single out Lee Evans. A few weeks ago Evans was irking me with his taking every set piece and playing every pass as a showy crossfield ball. Tonight, he wasn't perfect, tonight, at times his lack of nimbleness showed, at times, he still took the extra touch - but those imperfections aren't the point - we all have them, Sonny didn't always play the right ball, Ennis missed a great chance in the first half, Jimmy scuffed a clearance, I'm a terrible self editor and too fond of the lyrical when sometimes the succinct would work better and so on and so forth... - the point is, Evans subsumed himself to the team needs - he played the simple pass, he prompted Albie, he set away Sonny, he cleaned up. He played a gritty unshowy game and he contributed. He wasn't the best player on the pitch - but you can't have 11 best players - he was a player who did what was needed and that typifies us right now. He walked off the pitch looking like his legs were full of sand because he'd given everything he had. There's ego in this team - but it's a collective ego. There's some swagger - but that swagger is because we're us, not because 'I am'
Who knows what's next? If we turn up on Saturday and then the next game and so - we can do this. Sonny is playing the football of his life, Fletcher is a marvel of the modern age, Niall Ennis I love more by the minute, Albie I don't think I could love any more than I already do and so on and so forth. I could name them all. There's a team here and this team might be the product of a squad that is really paper thin but it's team that looks fit to wear this shirt and a team that plays the kind of football that we want to see and it seems they want to play.
What will be will be - but regardless of what happens in the end, all we can be is the best version of ourselves and increasingly, I look at the pitch and think that's what we're getting.
That's all we can really ask. For last night, I am genuinely thankful to every single one of them. It was magnificent.
Onward
You can follow MCLF on facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Threads and Instagram or use Follow.it to get posts sent to your email If you appreciate the blog and judge it worth 1p or more, then a donation to one of the causes below which help kids and families in Blackpool would be grand.
Writing about football is possibly a bit pointless in an era when there's the telly and youtube and videos all over the shop. It's not my living this and it's just something I do because I do so there's no problem with reading it and then getting on with your life - If you do want to chuck some money at the cause of some random fella writing shit no one ever asked him too, then Patreon. is a thing.
0 comments:
Post a Comment