“Oh, we play in black and white and we all know how to fight…”Īnd we stay put and we sing it, long after the stadium drains, serenading these old stanchions and pillars, wooing this emptiness as if there is nothing and nobody else but we and this moment…Īnd still they sing … this team. We sing it and we sing it and we sing it, long after our dog-weary players have thrown their shirts at us and stumbled back to the dressing-room…Īnd we sing it and we sing it, tops off and spectacles smashed, long after Steve Bruce has walked halfway across the pitch to salute and wave…Īnd we sing it and we sing on, long after the stewards corral us towards the stairs in the upper section of the Lower Bullens, with their “Come on lads, come on girls. “Who’s that team we call United? Who’s that team we all adore? Oh, we play in black and white and we all know how to fight, we’ll support you ever more…” This is who we are, who we used to be: these flying limbs, this disbelief, these punches to the bollocks, the elbow in the back and that spinning forward, hauled back by the collar and the beery embrace, the team in front of us, that laughter and that madness of what’s possible, of how it feels to be lucky and what it might feel like to be good… We have come to bear witness and to sing and drink and froth and spew.Īnd when that goal goes in, that second goal, that equalising goal, that 95th-minute nonsense, we lose ourselves in ourselves. We are the 1,500 black-and-white nomads who funnel past the stewards and the sniffer dogs through turnstile 56 into this wooden stand with its wooden seats on a Tuesday evening in January, the daft lads and lasses, the ald gadgies, the many. This is Everton away and we are Newcastle United, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, the pissed and the proud. Glancing down, his world swimming, he says “horse cock” to nobody. A little while later, a lad bounces from a concession stand holding a foot-long hot-dog smothered in red sauce. On this work night, this school night, our commitment is pebble-dashed on porcelain - this half-digested Scouse pie, these pints. Puke was spattered in the ladies’ toilet at 6.45pm don’t ask me how I know.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |