adminLONDON. — The stillness spoke volumes. There were 12 minutes left to play, but the game was over. Manchester United’s players were swarming around Marcus Rashford, scorer of his team’s third goal, the one that had settled matters. West Ham’s were staring blankly at the turf, unsure of quite how things had slipped away from them.
In the Billy Bonds stand, though, nobody moved. In ordinary circumstances, more than a handful would have picked themselves up with a shake of the head and a flash of anger, and made their way to the exits. A bitterly cold evening, a long trudge away from the stadium ahead, most reasonable hope extinguished. Why put yourself through any more?
But, of course, this was not an ordinary circumstance. It has been 271 days since fans were allowed to watch an English Premier League game in the flesh. The 2 000 West Ham supporters inside the London Stadium were the first to attend a game since March 9: another season, another world. These were the lucky few. Their reward was to sit and endure seeing their team beaten, 3-1 on Saturday.
There is a fairly brutal metaphor there, a reminder that sports is not a game of guarantees. There is no guarantee you will leave satisfied. There is no guarantee that your support will have any effect. As this game proved for at least half an hour — before West Ham came to life and scored the opening goal and before Manchester United, belatedly, decided to join in — there is no guarantee that this form of entertainment will even be entertaining.
Perhaps, though, there is one exception. Football’s past nine months have been marked, indelibly, by absence: first, for two months, of the sport as a whole, and then, for far longer, of the sport as it ought to be, not just a game but a spectacle, a conduit for contact and community and family and all those other things that have been lost, have been sacrificed, in far more significant ways over the course of this year.
Football has found a way through, to its credit, playing games in empty stadiums with vast banners draped over vacant seats and artificial soundtracks piped onto television feeds. It has made it work, as it had to do. But every goal that has been scored has brought a sense of regret, too, a sense that something was missing, a sense that nothing was the same.
To witness the return of fans, though, was to realize how much deeper the absence ran. Fans are, in a sincere but intangible way, the meaning of football, the meaning of sports. It is fans who define and determine what all of this means. In a more immediate sense, though, they provide the texture of the occasion that bring all of this to life in vivid Technicolor.
The roar after a goal, of course, is the clearest example, but the soundscape is far richer, far more diverse than that, and often not necessarily especially logical. The loudest cheer here on Saturday was not, for example, the one that greeted Tomas Soucek’s goal that put West Ham ahead. It was for a tackle by Declan Rice on Rashford.
Then there are all the sounds that are so much a part of the tableau that they are easily forgotten — the ripple of applause after a well-executed cross-field pass; the mocking jeer that accompanies a wayward touch; the raucous applause for a throw-in — and the noises that no algorithm or soundboard could hope to capture: the ebb and flow of excitement as a player dallies on the ball and an attack breaks down; the switch from cheer to groan as the referee halts a counter-attack because of a supposed injury. It is only when you hear them all again that you realize how much has been missing.
This is not the end of the journey, of course. Two thousand fans in a stadium that can hold 30 times that number can still be easily lost; the noise they generate is less a thunderclap and more a rain squall.
The Premier League has been lobbying the British government for months, insisting it has protocols in place that can safeguard far more fans than this. (It might, if it wishes to strengthen its case, point out that the vast mall that sits adjacent to the London Stadium was packed with Christmas shoppers on Saturday evening, making the most of the capital’s exit from the country’s most onerous lockdown restrictions this week. — AFP.
Online Reporter