Friday, September 27, 2019

Nobody Ever Says Thank You

I'm currently reading Nobody Ever Says Thank You, a biography of the English football manager Brian Clough, who died in 2004 and whose managing career stretched from the mid-sixties to the mid-nineties. He was particularly famous for taking unsuccessful teams, reviving their fortunes, and making them champions. He was also known for his outspokenness and his complex personality. The film The Damned United (starring Michael Sheen) is a heavily fictionalised account of one particular phase in his career.

I was very interested in soccer in my teens. Occasionally I think of reviving my interest; whenever I watch a soccer game on television, I become quite gripped.

But the main reason I read the book was because I had seen The Damned United, and because I absolutely love the title. It is taken from a piece of advice given to Clough by his mentor, who advised him that nobody ever said "Thank you" in the world of football management.

At five hundred pages long, it's quite an undertaking to read, and I've only browsed it in the past. (I found it on a book exchange shelf-- but I'd already been impressed by its title before I happened to discover it there.) Now I'm reading it all the way through.

This is partly because Clough is such an interesting figure, but it's partly because I'm so drawn to the world it describes-- especially at the beginning. It's a world of ice-bitten and waterlogged playing fields, windswept training grounds, cold dressing rooms, cups of Oxo (an incredibly potent beef extract drink), dour Yorkshiremen, verbal sparring, fish and chips, and so on. I don't find that atmosphere depressing-- I find it bracing.

But, reading the book, I realize there's another reason I'm enjoying it. The long litany of football results that forms much of the narrative is very appealing. I like the structure, the repetition (with variation), the sturdy framework-- 1-0 against Liverpool at Anfield, 2-1 against Wolverhampton at home, 3-3 against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge....there is a soothing poetry to it, not so different to the swash of the tide on the beach.

There is a mysterious connection between repetition and the sublime. This is very obvious when we think of the liturgy, the rosary, and the other repetitive aspects of Catholicism (and of all organised religion). The imagination is stirred by the thought of all the Masses celebrated through history, all the Masses celebrated today, the succession of bishops, the slow development of doctrine, the collision of time and timelessness this brings about.

The same applies to other areas of life-- cinema, for instance. What is playing at the local multiplex? Something is playing, right now. And some of the movies playing right now will enter into popular culture, and some may even enter into the cultural memory of society.

Football is the same. Although Brian Clough is dead now, and all the players he managed have long retired, Leeds United and Nottingham Forest and Derby County are still playing week in, week out-- rising up and down the tables, being promoted, being relegated, winning trophies, spending years in the wilderness (a delicious phrase). Football clubs have their own folklore, their own pantheons and legends, their own collective memory-- each of which forms a part of the sport's collective memory, which itself forms a part of a country's collective memory. There's something very exciting about that. At least, I find it exciting.

7 comments:

  1. Every time I see an English newspaper I find it hard to grapple the amount of league teams and, indeed, the layers of soccer leagues. A recent one had as it's back-page headline the defeat of Manchester United by the Canaries, which sounded curious... Norwich are apparently so-called for their team colours- which you wonder how they don't run out of combinations. And Norwich were only recently promoted to the top tier, so- a Wilson-like scenario

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    1. Well, lots of teams have the same combinations. They just play the away strip when they clash. And it's funny, reading the Clough book, I was actually surprised myself at how many layers of leagues there are, and how many are professional. Ireland's soccer league was only semi-professional until recently, and I think it's just about professional now.

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  2. Yes, and there's even something heraldic about the poetry of the names — Bolton Wanderers, Sheffield Wednesday, Accrington Stanley (who are they?).

    The same with railways and ferries, or so I find. There is something deeply poetic in sense of distance, and of trains or vessels plying their courses in ordered movement, each according to their routes and codes and patterns. Railways can turn a whole country into a poem.

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    1. Who are they? Exaggly!

      I think your comment expresses the appeal I'm trying to describe exactly! I find the football results soothing and poetic in the same way many people find the shipping forecast!

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    2. There is an episode of The Detectives, a nineties sit-com starring Jasper Carrot and Robert Powell, whose sub-plot concerns the detectives' attempt to think of every team suffix (Wednesday, Wanderers, etc.) in the League, for a police quiz. The last scene is them shouting at the camera: "Crewe ALEXANDRA!"

      Another plot destroyed by Google, I fear!

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  3. Poor Liverpool, lacking the suffix poetry ;-)

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    1. I suppose they find consolation in their groaning trophy cabinets!

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