Get Her Off the Pitch!

by Lynne Truss

  Anyway, back in London they wanted me to ‘go for’ Beckham. They had obviously mistaken me for some rottweiler alter ego, who went for people. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I just knew it was pointless asking me to call for David Beckham to be burned in effigy, and that, luckily, I worked for a newspaper that would not insert the words ‘I hereby call for him to be burned in effigy’ unless I actually wrote them. And I wouldn’t. ‘If we lose this, they’ll crucify him!’ my boss yelled. (He was hoarse by the end of the night from yelling to his troops in the cacophony of St Etienne.) And I yelled back, hopelessly, ‘But I feel sorry for him!’ And he’d shout, ‘He did something really stupid!’ And I’d shout, ‘Pardon?’ And he’d shout, ‘He deserves what’s coming to him!’ And I’d shout, ‘That’s why I feel sorry for him!’ I had to re-file my piece twice because it wasn’t strong enough, but I still refused to have a go. I said Beckham was incredibly talented, and it was tragic that there was nothing he could do to repair his mistake. In the end, the last edition went and my voiceless boss was obliged to forgive me my milksop girlie failings; characteristically, he never referred to the incident again.

  What he always loyally loved to tell people afterwards instead was that I was the only one of his writers in France who had predicted the home side to win the World Cup, which is a bizarre sports writing distinction I can’t not mention here, since it’s the only one I have. The paper had asked all its footie writers for its ‘top four’, you see, and printed them before the tournament. My prediction was: France, Brazil, Holland, England - which was extremely uncanny as things turned out, being correct in three out of four cases, with the top two in the right positions. More learned chaps such as Brian Glanville had gone for Brazil, Argentina, Italy and Germany (not that this gives me any pleasure to recall, you understand). However, my success was mostly fluke. Also, as I was always quick to point out, I had misunderstood the question in any case. I thought that by ‘top four’ they meant the teams that would make it to the semifinals. It was only when colleagues reported to me, chuckling with mirth, ‘I see you tipped France to win, Lynne,’ that I found out what I’d done.

  The End of the Affair

  So now I’m back to knowing nothing about football again, which is quite liberating. I wouldn’t say I had returned to normal, because that would raise too many complex questions. But I have established some distance, which was a conscious objective, and I no longer wake up screaming that Brian Glanville is working in a furniture shop and that he’s torn up my ticket for the public burning of David Beckham, but I’m in an airship so I can’t get there on time, and anyway I can’t park here and I don’t have the right kind of mobile. For a couple of years after my resignation, I did rail against sports writing’s shortcomings as a way of life - but I had faith that the reflex bitterness would pass away in time. One day, I solemnly hoped, I would be able to look at this little statuette of Alan Shearer without wanting to bash its smug little head in with the Sellotape dispenser. In the meantime, it was very therapeutic to burn some of my hideous (but warm) footie outfits, and ceremonially bury the set of universal tele-adaptors in a special place in the garden.

  Retrospective anger is quite a normal feature of breakup. For a while the ex-football writer is bound to rant against football’s failings: how selfish it was, how it always left the toilet seat up, how it dumped wet towels on the bed, stubbornly refused to ask directions when lost in Croydon. ‘You’re better off out of that,’ friends would declare, supportively, afterwards. ‘Football never understood you. I don’t know what you saw in it in the first place.’ Occasionally, in those tender first days of separation, news about football would filter back to me, and I’d try to be brave and send it good wishes. If football was getting on perfectly well on its own, I had no right to complain. After all, the idea that we go our separate ways had been entirely mine. My only consolation was in a perverse kind of pride. Had anyone ever left football so successfully before? I couldn’t believe they had, what with football being so damned attractive, so damned fascinating. The whole point of loving football is that you commit yourself for life. You clamber aboard the carousel (usually aged about six), cling on tight, and go round and round for ever. And here I was, jumping off after four revolutions, with no regard for injury or dizziness - and doing this, moreover, just when the fabulous Thierry Henry was starting to reign supreme at Arsenal.

  It wasn’t a simple reaction against sports writing. Obviously I had run out of patience with the lifestyle, but I was uncomfortable about something else; something very important. I was beginning to accept as normal a culture I knew to be horrible. Being aware of this was profoundly unsettling, especially for someone with only a shaky sense of their own identity in the first place. Put simply, it seemed to me that while I was still capable of being shocked by the stupidity and unhelpfulness of the donkey-jacket brigade, I was still me. When I stopped being shocked, I was lost. There is a powerful description in a book by James Hamilton-Paterson of what it’s like to be swimming alone in the ocean and mislay your boat. He explains that, because your eyes are a mere six inches above sea level, you can see only about ten feet in all directions, depending on the swell. Being up to your neck in deep water, there is nothing you can push against to make your head go higher. This may strike most people as obvious (especially anyone who does a lot of snorkelling), and I suppose it is, but I still find it a panic-inducing thought, and it reminds me of how I felt by the end of my sports writing career - frustratingly cut off from the natural landscape of my former life, in which I had sometimes cooked meals, and tended herbs in pots, and spent Saturday afternoons cosily indoors watching Sherlock Holmes, and remembered people’s birthdays. I couldn’t even see any of that namby-pamby stuff any more; I was up to my neck in donkey-jacket misery, without any means of levering myself up. I was sure the male sports writers managed to keep work and life more healthily separate than I did, but probably (and I try not to be peevish about this) they had wives at home to help.

  Did I also feel that I had started knowing too much? Well, that would be stretching things a bit, but I certainly felt I had seen quite enough sporting history made already, and that if I carried on, I might have to start questioning what sporting history was supposed to be exactly. It’s the main reason I felt I had to write this book - because if there’s one thing I’m endlessly fascinated and amused by, it’s the human struggle to establish a true perspective, or maintain it in the face of other people’s. If there isn’t a New Yorker cartoon on this, then there ought to be: the astronaut’s wife saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, you went up in space and the Earth looked like a beach ball. That doesn’t mean you can’t wash the car.’ Personally, I’ve found that dropping sport was as much an interesting experiment in perspective as taking it up in the first place. Looking back at specific long-ago matches, fights, games, cups, bouts and championships (for the purpose of this book), I have relived their claims to historic significance, at the same time as knowing that many of them lived on in people’s hearts and minds for about 24 hours at the most. Taking that great FA Cup semifinal between Middlesbrough and Chesterfield, for example, wouldn’t it be reasonable to suppose that teeny-weeny Chesterfield FC would still treasure the excitement of that very special match? That it would be screened once or twice a week in the town hall for the edification of the populace? But does the club even sell an official video? No. At the time of writing, Chesterfield has just been knocked out of the Cup and is offering a half-season pass for under twenty quid, which suggests there are immediate concerns that take precedence over nostalgia. The website offers a menu of Home, News, Match, Team, Tickets, Club, Fans, and Commercial. You will notice how ‘Glorious Cup Runs of Yesteryear’ is absent from this list.

  And yet, that match at Old Trafford seemed jolly historic at the time. Is this all a con trick, then? Is it sheer propaganda, this idea that a great feat will live on? When those over-excited Sky Sports commentators say ‘one for the annals’, do they think ‘annals’ is a
synonym for ‘bins’? That bloke in Newcastle who said he’d be telling his kids about Kevin Keegan when they were old enough - well, I’m beginning to suspect he forgot all about it the minute he got home (and anyway, since then, Keegan’s been back to Newcastle and then gone again, so the kids probably wouldn’t want to hear about him anyway). Sport is all present tense, and its present tense is packed with event, so there’s no time for much of a backward glance. Open the newspaper any day at ‘Today’s fixtures’ and you will see races to be rowed, ridden, driven and run; games to be played; fights to be settled; championships to be claimed. If there is not a major international football tournament being played today, by definition there are qualification rounds in progress, with a points table and goal difference. The main thing that worried me about sport from the outset was its sense of its own importance, especially when its everyday feats (conducted for profit, don’t forget) were reinforced with glorifying abstract nouns such as ‘greatness’ and ‘meaning’. Every piece of sport I’ve written about in this book seemed truly significant on the day it took place (even the darts match) - but was it? The only reason I can imaginatively reach back to these events after a gap of years is that, for me, the gap of years contained, mainly, trips to the theatre, some remedial herb-gardening and a lot of talking about commas and semicolons.

  Sport goes on and on and on, you see. You have to run on the spot to keep up. Events just keep on coming: moreover, they keep coming in exactly the same order, year after year, which is sensible, but also a bit depressing if the sporting calendar’s rigid cycle dictates your actual life. What I grew to realise was that, in order to relish the eternal, cyclical nature of sport (as opposed to resenting it), you need a combination of mental capacities that are all quite alien to me: one of which (oh, the shame of it) is the simple ability to retain cold information such as who won last time, who won the time before, and by how much.

  Possibly this does not come as a surprise, but it is worth reiterating: the ability to remember who won last time, and who won the time before, is pretty much essential to a sports writer. You can therefore imagine my dismay when I realised I did not have it. Whenever I applied to the appropriate sporting-statistics area of my brain for some quick answers about scores or results, all I found there was the set used in Teletubbies: a broad, rolling landscape with a rainbow and twittering birdsong, with hopping brown bunny rabbits in the foreground to provide a sense of scale. When someone asks, ‘So who won the 2008 Open at Birkdale?’ a sports writer should be able to reply, ‘Tsk, Padraig Harrington, of course. He finished with a 69.’ It is no good if, like me, you initially find the question abrupt and slightly irrelevant and therefore puzzling. Who won? After all, the Open took place over four days, and the winning bit happened for only about an hour at the end. Birkdale, for me, was where Greg Norman made his amazing comeback. There was no Tiger Woods, because of his knee. The rain was torrential. Ian Poulter did extremely well on the last day, and Sandy Lyle gave up on the Friday because his glasses kept steaming up. But who won it? Who did win it? I remember we were all very pleased, which ought to be a clue. Think Sunday afternoon, Lynne. Think 18th green with long shadows. You stood at the back of the green to watch the last putts. Tip of the tongue, truly. It wasn’t Padraig again, was it? And as the fog clears, do you know something? I’m beginning to think it was! I can see him now on the 18th! Yes. Padraig Harrington it certainly was. And jolly well deserved too.

  I knew I had this statistic-retention problem quite early in my sports writing career. Winning and losing made much less of an impression on me than they did on others - which was another persuasive reason for keeping my mouth shut in the presence of proper sports writers. Once, at a Leicester-Liverpool match in the 1998-99 season, I insanely remarked to an amicable chap from the Sunday Mirror that I’d attended the same fixture the year before. I remembered because the match had provided my first in-the-flesh sighting of the young Michael Owen. But this was a conversation I should never have started. ‘What was the score?’ the Sunday Mirror man asked - and I honestly don’t think he was trying to trick me; he thought I’d be able to tell him. So that was the end of our little chat; and probably the end of me, as far as he was concerned. Chewing the lip, I had to admit I had no idea who’d won Leicester-Liverpool in January 1998, let alone the scoreline. (I’ve just checked: it was a goalless draw.) My principal memory from that previous match was a visual one: of seeing Owen clattered and left for dead on the touchline by someone considerably stockier than him. I remembered a pathetic little red heap of clothing that didn’t move. I remembered, at a stretch, that the atrocity had been perpetrated by a big man dressed in blue. But as for any other details - well, I’m sorry, officer, I think I’ve told you everything I know.

  This issue of memory was always a big one for me. It seemed to me that my main disqualification as a sports writer was that my memory for statistics is staggeringly short-term, while my emotional memory is the sturdy means by which I navigate life. Unfortunately, a love of sport requires these positions to be switched. You must remember scorelines stretching back to the dawn of time, and at the same time possess the emotional recall of a gnat. Fans are blessed with an ability to live in the continuous present, as if under a beautiful spell of forgetfulness, in which every day is a clean slate and hope triumphs over empiricism, and in which it is sheer wicked heresy to say that Tim Henman probably won’t win Wimbledon (on the grounds that it’s obvious), or that England’s footballers will more than likely go to pieces when the chips are down. Just as I felt embarrassed on account of my inability to store Open champions on a convenient page of my mental ledger for more than a couple of weeks, so I was continually confused by the way I was supposed to forget quite big things such as how much it hurts when England doesn’t win at football. In life it is surely a good policy to guard against disappointment by adjusting expectations. For example, if Christmas is always a disaster, you stop looking forward to it. This is a simple matter of self-preservation.

  But fans don’t have this self-preservation instinct. They always come back with hope in their hearts, as if nothing bad has ever happened. At club level, they even get fanatically attached to individual players, when the age-old convention of musical-chairs football transfers ought to tell them not to. Instead of forestalling the inevitable, however, they wait for the blows and then roll with them. It’s touchingly simple. One week you are a Spurs fan so devoted to Dimitar Berbatov that you get the Bulgarian national flag tattooed across your face; and the next week, when he’s signed to Manchester United, you go out and buy a balaclava. You don’t dwell on it, that’s the main thing. You might shout ‘Judas!’ at him on his first re-visit, but then you let it go. I suppose you are too happily occupied recollecting every Leicester-Liverpool score since the dawn of football. Or maybe you are too busy studying an old straggly frond in your goldfish bowl for the hundredth time today and saying, ‘Blimey, that’s attractive. Is it new?’

  It’s perfectly all right to have no emotional memory - after all, psychopaths generally manage without, and you don’t hear them complaining. But unreal expectations of sport aren’t just about not remembering; they arise out of magical thinking, which is what you get if you add wilful obtuseness to unchecked sentimentality and then allow yourself to get wildly over-excited into the bargain. As an example of magical thinking in sport, we only have to think of that match at Wembley between Germany and England in October 2000. People at the highest level of the game could see all the dismal England football performances under the reign of Kevin Keegan, yet they could still organise an England-Germany match as the Wembley swan song. ‘We could win that!’ they will have said. ‘It would be great to beat Germany in our last Wembley match!’ Even the sports writers (and the sports editors, for other reasons) are not immune to this sheer mad logic - and it used to make me quite scared for their mental well-being. They would imagine the wished-for result - England wins back the Ashes, in Australia! Tim Henman finally wins Wimbledon! - a
nd then they would start not only excitedly believing it, but even planning how to cover the victory parade. The moment England scrapes into any tournament, it’s the same old story. ‘There’s nothing to stop us winning this, you know,’ they start saying. ‘We’ve got six or seven world class players in there.’

  The one policy issue I used to argue about with my boss was this irresponsible hyping of British (specifically English) chances in major competitions. The fact that false hope sells newspapers is no excuse. But I think the corollary disagreement we had was even more infuriating. This was the one that invariably took place after England was knocked out at the group stage - or Lee Westwood missed the cut - or Henman reached his predictable (but still very respectable) limit in the quarterfinal - when the office would say, dogmatically and harshly, ‘That’s it. No one will be interested now. You might as well come home.’ That used to make me very cross. For a start, I was sure our football-loving readers weren’t all raving jingoists. For another thing, if all the excitement around this tournament had truly been attached only to national expectations, who was to blame? And third, although I was careful not to say this too clearly in print (for fear of hurting the already tender feelings of the England fans), I positively adored all competitions the moment the red herring of England’s chances was safely off the agenda. It was such a great relief to get on with the football. What bliss to watch Holland-Italy, and not worry about hundreds of semi-naked English thugs rampaging in some quaint foreign town and finally being contained by water cannon. As for the annoying people-will-lose-interest-in-Wimbledon-now argument, I used to point out that, before Tim Henman came along, there had been decades without a realistic British hope, and the fans had happily rooted for Australians, Americans, Germans. All my anti-jingoist arguments fell on deaf ears, though. Presumably the sales figures proved me wrong.