#1 - Origin Stories
Falling in love with Andrei Kanchelskis and other childhood mistakes
Royal Union St Gilloise 2 : 0 Royal Antwerp F.C.
Stade Joseph Marien, Vorst
15 January, 2023
It’s been raining for the best part of the whole day. The people on the tram from Midi, brightened with flashes of blue and white, smell of damp scarves and aftershave. It’s a big game, Union versus Antwerp. Belgium’s third most successful against its oldest. Two clubs that have known the ignominy of the lower leagues in recent - sometimes very recent - memory. Both have munificent benefactors bankrolling their respective revivals, and are now firmly ensconced at the top of the Jupiler League, Union second and Antwerp third.
The weather has winnowed attendance down to a modest turnout for a top of the table clash, but there are still crowds queuing up under the sodium-powered street lamps outside the stadium for a worstje and a pintje. I’m in the uncovered north stand tonight, behind Antwerp’s goal in the first half. Opposite us on the other side of the pitch are the away fans. They’ve shown up in force, even if they’ve left their tifos at home, a big black mass of very loud - very loud - supporters. I’ve no plastic bag to put on my baby blue seat, so I have to put up with my jeans absorbing the standing water deposited by the day’s showers. Vamos a la playa belts out of the sound system, the teams come out and line up, someone kicks off and the game is away.
11 minutes in and Victor Boniface, Union’s sturdy forward, embarrasses professional Johnny Toby Alderweireld only to thurrock the greasy ball into the stand to my left. The crowd erupts with a rendition of “USG Allé” and a few minutes later it’s the turn of their midfield terrier Lazare to sidefoot into the hoardings in front of us. The people in the seats around me are scrunched up tight against each other or under umbrellas even though the rain has stopped, and the floodlights catch the white of our breath against the evening sky. On 32 minutes Antwerp have the ball in the net but it’s hard for us to work out what’s gone on because it’s happened at the far side of the pitch. The referee puts a stiff arm in the air for an offside, and while we and the Antwerp collective are still working through the decision RUSG have barreled back up to our end and Dante Vanzeir is collecting the ball on the edge of the box and he’s herdling a prone Boniface at the penalty spot and he’s walloping the ball past Antwerp’s keeper and it’s 1-0. That’s how it stays until half time.
Sitting in my damp seat during half-time, I google Antwerp’s starting 11. I don’t know much about the club beyond Toby Alderweireld’s presence and that their director of football is disgraced sex pest and former Arsenal player Marc Overmars. I also remember that the club and I have a connection, albeit a tenuous one; in the 1990s, we both had a consequential relationship with Manchester United.
For a time in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the English club used Antwerp as a finishing school, sending post-1992 second and third tier talents like Ronny Wallwork, Luke Chadwick, and even Ireland’s own John O’Shea on loan to Belgium for a season or two. By the time this farm system had started my ardour for United had dissipated, but I can’t deny - as much as I would like to - that Manchester United are responsible for my love of football. I blame my uncle and grandfather, though I still don’t know how they let it happen; they were, after all, Spurs fans with stories of travelling over to England in the 1960s and 1970s and tagging on trips to White Hart Lane while visiting relatives in Luton. It could have been very different. They never tried to brainwash me with stories of Bill Nicholson or Gary Mabutt, but I do have very loose memories about there being talk of taking me to see Cork City play Leeds in a pre-season friendly at Turner’s Cross in 1993. Maybe we did go and I just don’t remember. What I do remember, and what have since become foundations of my football fan creation myth, are two Manchester United games.
The first was at Tolka Park, two streets over from the terraced house in Drumcondra where my grandfather was born. Dublin’s Shelbourne against United. United won, and comfortably so, but I remember nothing of the football. I remember little other than that the sun was hot that day and the sky bright blue, that the crowd was wearing various shades of red and white, that the pitch was lime green and the main stand next to the Tolka river was bright red.
The Shelbourne game was just a prelude to the main event: Manchester United versus Nottingham Forest at Old Trafford in November 1993. We flew out from Dublin early in the morning, stopping in at the Arndale centre on the way to buy a scarf for me at the United superstore in one of the underground levels. This was going to be my first real, proper football match. A perfect initiation for a new fan, as guaranteed a home victory as you could think of, with United then on a long unbeaten streak in the league. It didn’t quite turn out that way. United lost, Forest scoring twice before Eric Cantona scored a spectacular overhead flick from a corner. But we - I’d travelled over with my uncle Joe and my cousin David - didn’t care. We’d just seen a real life Premiership match, and flew home that evening happy and exhausted and overawed by our day out at the Theatre of Dreams and confirmed in our absolute righteousness in supporting United.
In his excellent collection of essays on sport, The Game, Cork-based writer Tadhg Coakley talks about his own arrival into sporting fanaticism. There’s a few points in his early life, Coakley writes, that could have been responsible. His brother Dermot winning an All Ireland Minor medal, or the young Tadhg’s wonder at watching George Best’s “immeasurable beauty…his impossible grace.” But there’s a particular game, and a particular incident, that stands out. He’s ten, it’s 1971, and he’s watching a Cork hurler - Con Roche - hit a sideline ball for a goal for Cork against Tipperary to win a Munster final. The wonder and the exhilaration of that moment made an indelible impact on young Tadhg, and how through the rest of his life he’s been consciously or unconsciously seeking to recapture it, “like an addict craving that first high”.
The thing is, Coakley says later, his memory has betrayed him. The game wasn’t a final but a semi-final. Cork didn’t win, they lost. They were playing Limerick not Tipp, and Roche didn’t even score with his sideline cut. But for Coakley these misrememberings are incidental, trifling details that fail to take away from the wider truth of his version of events and their importance to him and his sporting awakening.
Looking up the details of my own foundational myth I realise my memory, like Coakley’s, is not as reliable as I thought it was. United did lose to Forest, and Cantona did score their only goal. That much is true. But it didn’t happen in 1993 but the season afterwards, a week before Christmas. I’m entirely sure we ever did actually go to the Arndale, and whether there was a club superstore in there at all. It's hard to check, the IRA having blown it up two years after our visit. Worst of all, watching a fuzzy YouTube highlights video of the match, I’m disappointed to find that United’s goal, which in my memory involved an ingenious proto-Ibrahimovic contortion and flailing of limbs by Cantona through confused Forest players was nothing of the kind. It was instead a perfunctory near-post header back across the goal.
Do these inaccuracies matter? Not to Coakley. “They are true in a greater sense, a more marvellous sense, with their own particular veracities,” he writes in The Game. Coakley found his place in sport that day, and I found something similar on our little winter excursion to Manchester. 30 years (well, technically 29) later it’s not so much the specifics of the game that still have such a purchase on my memory. It’s not the gameplay or the goals - Cantona’s aside - which have stayed with me but the colours of the day. The deep mauve of the dawn sky above Dublin. The blue and white liveried plane and the festive illustrations on the tail. The orange and brown tiling of an underground passage in the Arndale centre. The dull green of a well-trodden pitch in a north English winter. The red and black and yellow and green in the stands. The colours, and the unfathomable weight of the crowd on the concourses before the game and in the stairwells after fulltime.
These colours were real, the visceral experience of being in the crowd and the noise were all true. They are still vivid 30 years later and I cherish the memories of that day because they appear to me to come from someone else’s life, to have happened to someone who had an uncomplicated childhood and not someone who was flying back home to a family breakdown and warring parents and sessions with the family counsellor. Sometimes, it’s like these memories have a golden halo around them, unsullied by everything else going on at that time and all the more vivid for it.
Either way, by the time I clambered up into the Ryanair plane for the flight home, I was hooked. I didn’t know much then, but I knew Paul Parker was a right back, that Andrei Kanchelskis was Russian, that Mark Hughes’ nickname was Sparky, and that Alex Ferguson was an avuncular god. I idolised Dennis Irwin and Roy Keane, and the football pitches around Cork where they’d played as children became sites of holy pilgrimage. My most prized possession aged seven, and the only thing I’d ever hung on my bedroom wall, was a signed poster of a hirsute Ryan Giggs in full flight and thicket of black curls bobbing behind him. It was smuggled back across the Irish sea by my uncle Joe, though I never found out how.
My infatuation didn’t last forever. I remained loyal to Keane and Irwin when they played for Ireland, but I never got back to another United game. My cousin still flew the flag, but by the time United’s defining triumphs in 1999 came, I’d moved on to new footballing crushes, seduced by the romance of the underdog. Where’s the fun in supporting a team that wins everything, and is hated by everyone? Instead, I was naively drawn to the ageing continental glamour of pre-Abramovich Chelsea. But as much as teenage me might have scorned them, I can’t deny United’s central place in my football origin story.
For Chelsea in the late-’90s, read Royal Union St Gilloise. The second half kicks off at the Stade Joseph Marien, but I’m confident little will live long in my memory. Most of the game takes place at the far end of the pitch, too far to make out much of what’s happening. The rain and the wind wind themselves up again around the hour mark, and I spend much of the rest of the game squinting into the distance when I’m not wrangling my umbrella. There’s a penalty for Union in the 76th minute, for some distant indiscretion. Their Maltese Captain Teddy Teuma puts it away and we cheer in appreciation. The next 15 minutes my hands stay in my pockets and I’m craning my head to check the time on the big blue screen behind and wondering when it is socially acceptable to make an early exit. But I see the game out until the end, and everyone heads off into the greasy sodium-yellow streets.
What I’ve been reading: The Game: A Journey into the heart of sport. A collection of essays by Irish writer Tadhg Coakley, in which he works through his relationship with sport as a player and as a spectator, how it’s played such an essential role in his life and his conception of himself, and why that might be the case. I bought my copy from The Gutter Bookshop in Dublin, via their online shop. Expect to see it feature again in future editions of this newsletter.
What I’ve been watching: When Karou Mitoma played on loan at Union last season, he looked like an ultra high definition player in an 8-bit league. He often only came on as a second half substitute, as if his coaches thought it would be unfair to the opponents to deploy their cheat code. Well, he’s starting for Brighton in the Premier League now, and scoring ludicrous goals that confirm our impressions of him as a freakishly gifted player. I watched his last-minute, game-winning goal against Liverpool in the FA Cup last weekend on a loop once the highlights went up on YouTube, because I couldn’t work out what he’d done the first time around. A supreme combination of calmness, physical dexterity, and ruthlessness that deserves an essay all of its own. Seek it out.
