Talk to the Elbow

At Last! Someone from outside Sunderland and Teesside realises what we've been banging on about all these years and doesn't put it down to sour grapes!

And an etiquette author too no less...

Heroes & Villains

During Euro 96, Lynne Truss admired Alan Shearer so much she even dreamt about him. Now she sees only a 'waddling, sullen, dirty, immovable obstacle to beautiful football'

Sunday April 2, 2006
The Observer

I seem always to be telling the story of how, in 1996, I was lured into football writing by a rather fiendish sports editor at the Times. 'But I know nothing of football, sir!' I simpered in falsetto, arching my neck and fluttering a fan in front of my face; 'I am a lady, surely you can see that?' But they sent me to Wembley to see England v Switzerland, and it was rather exciting and interesting and oddly real, and then I kept going for four years, and my testosterone levels shot right up, and my voice got deeper, and I got incredibly opinionated and was always freezing - but in all conscience, good grief, I just can't repeat that story all over again.

Suffice to say, anyway, that it left me with some rather unfeminine vestigial reflexes - the most embarrassing of which is that I can't hear the name Alan Shearer without spitting on the floor. This can be a burden in polite society - especially among those who don't know that football support is as much about seething with irrational hatred for certain individual players as it is about blindly adoring them. When I first started attending England matches, it confused me to find that portions of the crowd actually booed substitutions, and that you weren't allowed to say, 'Good old Platt!' under any circumstances. It took me about two short weeks to absorb this tendency, however.

And now I just hate Alan Shearer - even though he has (obviously) never done anything to me. While others have recently celebrated the Newcastle captain's breaking of Jackie Milburn's club goal-scoring record, or noted with neutral interest a new book entitled Alan Shearer: Captain Fantastic, I have narrowed my eyes, noisily evacuated some phlegm, and then said: 'What? He's still getting away with it?'

Annoyingly, I have to admit that I started out admiring Shearer very much. In fact, in the second week of Euro 96 I informed my readers that I'd had a dream about him working in a furniture shop - which thankfully I didn't pause to analyse. Foolhardily, I added a week later: 'A month ago I had never heard of Alan Shearer. Now I want to have his babies.' I was so keen to accumulate detail that I even read that infamously dull book, Diary of a Season, in which Shearer celebrates Blackburn's league victory in 1995 by creosoting a fence.

But then I started to scrutinise the teamwork aspect of England games and I began to dislike nearly everything about the way he played. He would wait to be served perfect passes (with his hand raised) and sulk when they didn't come. He would foul defenders (with his elbow) and mysteriously get away with it. He would walk upfield (with his arm up) when everyone else was running. And as the team acquired younger, more dynamic players who kept their arms down, he started to seem like a big, waddling, sullen, dirty, immovable and permanently pointing obstacle to beautiful football.

Team strategy was apparently built round him, and this made me mad. True, at the World Cup in France, he got fitter and faster again, but it was his needless foul on the Argentinian goalkeeper (or so I said, thumping the table) that really lost us that fateful match at Saint-Etienne, after Sol Campbell's goal was disallowed as a consequence.

Here are the regular questions I would ask, out loud, in exasperation, at England matches during this period: How does he get away with it? Why is he walking? Why doesn't anyone notice that he raised his arm to appeal for that penalty before he artfully tripped over the keeper? Why doesn't he run? Why is he never rested? Why is he never substituted? Would you call that strolling or ambling? Why is he never sent off? Why is he never even booked? Who died and made him God? At a football writers' dinner one year I was lucky enough to sit next to Ted Beckham, and what did I do? Instead of angling for anecdotes of the infant David, I moaned on and on and on about Alan Bloody Shearer.

Now, many people (especially in the north-east) applaud Shearer for other qualities; I know that. According to a recent Swedish dissertation on his place in Newcastle legend, he is a true 'hero' in that he possesses 'a consistent capacity for action that surpasses the norm of man'. Even I can see that he is physically brave, unbelievably tough and fiercely committed. At a time when English football is a showcase for international mercenaries, Shearer is a home-grown, bullet-headed, hairy-kneed yeoman - and he knows where the goal is, which helps.

I think it wasn't Shearer himself that I hated most: it was the official blindness shown towards his limitations that exasperated me. His talismanic status made him exempt from question, and I couldn't accept that. Nowadays (except in the north-east), it seems there is generally more criticism of a) his 'manly' style of football, b) his inexplicable untouchability where refs are concerned, and c) his ability to intimidate managers, so that if they leave him off the team sheet, they get instant delivery of a P45. But it's a bit late now to help me with my spitting problem. Why would I still feel this strongly? It just goes to show what football does to you, once you let it inside your brain.

Falling out of Love

“Then you find your heart no longer flutters
And you no longer look through a lover's eyes
What's to see when the world falls down around you?
You simply can't believe it, but it comes as no surprise”

Falling out of Love by John Denver

I’ve seen us lose home and away to Grimsby.

The pinnacle of my maternal grandfathers Boro supporting career was reached by Charlton’s Champions. The other lived to see us get to Wembley for the first time but no further. I lived in house called Ayresome Lodge and once drove 1200 miles - (3 home games in 3 weeks) to see three 0-0 draws.

So why, albeit listening to the Boro at Man City as I write, am I not compelled to do so? Not 18 months ago, I’d be in the stand with the other die hards but why not now?

Because like a lot of other Boro and football fans I know and have spoken to, the love affair is over. The kids have left home and graduated in Cardiff; now we look at each other and realise that we’re two different people from when we met on that sunny afternoon in Hartlepool 20 years ago.

Saturday was and still is the most important day of the week for me. The traditional matchday has a rhythm all of its own – familiar meals and faces followed by familiar walks and pubs. The conversations have changed though. The bare excitement of anticipation has been replaced by something else. Like a visit to a relative you can’t stand but can’t get out of; thousands of people (less than before) walk to the Riverside with the resigned humour of the trenches and the broken ambitions of men passed over for promotion too many times. Football provides so many emotions I don’t need to tell you but whereas victory should provide the purest of these – now I feel the basest. Relief. Of course I’m happy when we win and disappointed when we lost but the sensations have been dulled to the point where the most basic – relief at avoiding defeat, humiliation, relegation – are the strongest.

The majority of the performances at home this season haven’t helped. I was at work for the watershed Villa match but managed to watch it and could feel the pure anger flow from the monitor speakers as I began to question the evidence of my eyes. That a highly paid professional football team were capable of acts of physical ineptitude that a trained circus troupe would be hard pressed to emulate.

Like a partner who feels their contribution to the relationship is being taken forgranted, I’m looking at my own unmatched efforts more and more. The money, the travel, the leave taken, the inconveniences, the potential for trouble. 20 years of mainly unrequited love, like following the support band on a tour.

I’m not the only one. The Championship and Division One resemble an Aircraft graveyard of burnt out husks of once mighty war engines – Leeds, Wolves, Derby, Forest and every single team in Yorkshire.

At the very least, we are at the zenith of the English game, the Premiership, and all the attention and profile that brings and maybe that’s the problem. World-wide exposure, Match of the Day, Sky, 23 non-Saturday Kick-offs, Asian TV, webcasts.

In the same way that teams have to get used to winning and success, maybe so do the supporters. 80’s nostalgia is all the rage and I look back at 1986 to 19889 as my rock n roll years. We were the best kept secret in football and I liked it like that. 10 bleach blond Teessiders and an Elvis look-alike who had almost as many hits as the other King. Every week, we turned up to back them and every week, or so it seemed, we were rewarded. We played well and more often or not, won.

As well all know, like a lot of relationships, success turned their heads. More glamorous suitors came knocking as we hit rocky times and took advantage as they left for, footballing, better times. I stayed, and despite a lot of other successful relationships, more successful than I could have hoped, I still haven’t forgotten, or got over, my first loves.

Maybe my ambitions are so narrow that I am a typical small-town small-timer. Don’t get ahead of yourself, settle for what you’ve got, don’t try so you won’t cry. Settle for survival and miss knocking around with our old mates Barnsley and Notts County who also didn’t risk it.

But in my own life I did break out. I moved away, reluctantly, but things worked out for me, and the Boro. I except in some ways we’ve both moved on and we’re both better for it but like the growing minority of Chelsea fans bemoaning the methods if not the achievements – we all know something is missing and it isn’t coming back.

I’ll be on my settee on Thursday night, physically in Oxfordshire but spiritually back home, cheering on the escape and while I want nothing more than Ayegbeni Yakubu to score a first half hat-trick; I have now come to reluctantly accept that I’ll never love him like I loved Archie Stephens.