#2 - God bless you, Dante Vanzeir
On Eduardo Galeano, Arthur Hopcraft, and the shock of an early goal
Royal Union St Gilloise 2 : 1 Cercle Brugge
Stade Joseph Marien, Vorst
9 October, 2022
Dante Vanzeir is a tidy player. Neither very tall nor obviously on the short side, he wears his hair in a short back and sides and modest fringe gelled to one side. Vanzeir runs around the Stade Marien pitch with his yellow Royal Union St Gilloise jersey tucked neatly into his blue shorts. He’s got one cap for the Belgian national team, half an hour in a dead rubber game against Wales. He’s had a solid career at Union, averaging a goal every other game and now he’s off to New York Red Bulls. His career will likely be a good one, solid and unspectacular, and tidy.
But on a cold Sunday night in early October, three minutes into a game against Cercle Brugge, I’m not shouting Vanzeir’s name in ecstasy because of his modest career. One minute, I’m sitting by myself in the uncovered stand, alone and exhausted and crying into my scarf. Then, barely before the crowd in Vorst has time to settle in for the game, Union’s on-loan Ivorian winger Simon Adingra has gone up the other end of the pitch, skinned his man and planted the ball on Vanzeir’s head in the six-yard box. He nuts the ball past Brugge’s goalkeeper and I’m up on my feet and shouting expletives and turning to the stranger in the seat next to me and we’re rocking each other’s shoulder and screaming into each other’s unfamiliar faces and pumping our fists.
I don’t think we even shared a common language, in fact I’m pretty confident we didn’t. But there we were, conjoined in elation at the thrill of a goal arriving so early in the game. The goal, its scorer, and the celebration it sparked, has sublimated my depression into a kind of nervous giddiness. Football will do that to you.
The journalist Eduardo Galeano knew this feeling and what it meant to be a football fan. How in the act of passing under the entrance of a stadium there is the potential to slough off the daily grind of modern life and to enlist in a holy pilgrimage honouring “the only religion without atheists” with its whispered prayers and fanatical devotion. In Soccer in Sun and Shadow, his collection of short essays on football, the Uruguayan Galeano - a Nacional fan - writes about the experiences, the characters and the emotions that made him fall in love with football. He writes about how the fan, on arriving on the football terrace stops being an I and becomes a we, and how when a goal goes in for “us”, Galeano’s fan “suddenly breaks out in an ovation, leaping like a flea to hug the stranger at his side cheering the goal.”
For Galeano, the game out on the pitch is not a game but a “pagan mass”, and during the service “the fan is many. Along with thousands of other devotees he shares the certainty that we are the best, that all referees are crooked, that all adversaries cheat.” For a long time, at football matches, I struggled to see myself as part of that “many”. I just never quite seemed to be able to muster the passion to qualify as a fan as Galeano describes it, never mind the Uruguayan’s idea of a fanatic, someone for whom “omnipotence on Sunday exorcises the obedient life he leads the rest of the week: the bed with no desire, the job with no calling or no job at all.” It’s not like I haven’t experienced my share of impotence, and I have tried.
"…football affects its followers like drink: it disentangles some of their inner nature from the subduing mesh rather than makes them behave out of character.” - Arthur Hopcraft
After my early attachment to Manchester United, I tried out Cork City, the closest “big” club to us in Carrigaline. But my one game at a damp Turner’s Cross, Cork versus Sligo Rovers, ended in an ignominious defeat for the home team. Neither the dim allure of possible league titles in the future nor my friends' ardour for the local team could convince me to go back and try again. Fuelled by hours poring over back issues of World Soccer Magazine I became the worst kind of football supporter: the fair-weather fan, someone who might actually say within earshot of normal people that no, I didn’t have a club, I just support good football.
First there was the pre-Abramovich Chelsea of Desailly, Leboeuf, and Casiraghi. Then I discovered Saturday morning Football Italia and my head was turned by Totti, Cafu, and Marco Delvecchio at turn-of-the-century Roma. In the early 2000s my favourite t-shirts were a silver Barcelona away jersey bought at the Camp Nou stadium shop and an oversized Real Madrid shirt with Zidane on the back, the same one he wore when he scored an extraterrestrial volley in the Champions League final. Galeano would have understood my magpie-ing; he admitted that his own fervent support for Nacional was undermined by his appreciation of star Uruguayan internationals that played for their arch-rivals. We were both, in his words, “beggar[s] for good soccer.”
I celebrated that Zidane goal in that final on the couch in our front room. A couple of months, on the same couch, I stamped my feet, clenched my fists and lost my mind when I watched Niall Quinn flick on a goal kick past lumbering German defenders and Robbie Keane contort his body like a retired gymnast to hook the ball past Olivier Kahn into a goal on the other side of the world. Most of the most vivid footballing memories I have are in that room, or in other front rooms like it. It’s not that I didn’t go to stadiums to see live football. There were Ireland games at the old Lansdowne Road, several trips back to Barcelona, and briefly in 2006 a semi-regular residency at Czech club SK Sigma Olomouc. But these games were an exception; most of my supporting and celebrating I did at home, on my own.
I was never able to work out how to navigate the assertively male world of the football crowd. So I became afraid of it, and I stayed away. English writer Arthur Hopcraft, in his 1968 book The Football Man, writes (fondly) of the “delirium”, the “oafish anarchy” and the potential for “spontaneous violence” in a stadium full of working class football fans. Where Galeano saw male communal ecstasy, Hopcraft was wiser to the crowd’s more febrile instincts. He thought it was congenitally “more vinegar than Chanel” but that there was nothing exceptional or objectionable about its aggressive masculinity: “football affects its followers like drink: it disentangles some of their inner nature from the subduing mesh rather than makes them behave out of character.”
What packed football stadiums brought out in me wasn’t violence but panic. I’d never learned how to navigate large crowds of excitable men, and was cowed by them. I didn’t know where or how to stand, what to shout, which songs to sing. I was afraid that in my panic and social anxiety I would say or do the wrong thing and be revealed for the interloping poseur. I was afraid of wanting so badly to fit into this masculine world and to be privy to their secret language, that I would give myself away. I was afraid too of rejection, really, of not belonging and of being cast out from Galeano’s we and returning to my solitary I. I’d tell myself it was an allergy to dogmatic thinking that stopped me picking a team to support and sticking with them, but as any child of divorce will tell you, it’s always easier to get your rejection in first. But more than that, I hated exposing myself and my emotions. I didn’t want people to know what I thought or how I felt. I never have; it’s why, in the early days of our relationship, my now-wife and I would have stand-up rows over my discomfort at her sharing with her family some trivial - if intensely personal, to me - occurrence in my life.
It wasn’t just football; I can count on two hands the number of live music concerts I’ve ever been to. I just couldn’t abide people knowing too much about me, knowing things I have not consented to their knowing, and that I may let slip in the heat of a contested refereeing decision or the delirium of a last-minute equaliser. It was ridiculous, obviously. I’m old enough now to know that. But when I was younger I just couldn’t get out of my own way and enjoy myself.
So despite my love of football, I rarely saw it live. I experienced it at a remove, through Tuesday night Champions League games on ITV, on podcasts (many, many podcasts), and in Youtube highlights reels. Which was, for a long time, good enough. Until the pandemic. My world, like everyone else’s, collapsed in on itself, only I realised that mine didn’t have all that much collapsing to do. Kids and work and natural shyness has shrunk my extra-familial activities down to their bare essentials even before Covid. The pandemic forced me to see how small my life had become, how much I’d removed myself from the world, not just football, and that living in my head all the time wasn’t healthy for me or the people I lived with. Post-Covid I realised I needed to get back out and start experiencing things - films, friends, football matches - in the flesh and not mediated by a screen.
Getting a season ticket for Union games was a part of this effort, but in October 2022 it was still a work in progress. I’m older now, and less worried about how strangers will react to my shouting and cursing, but some old fears still remain and the procrastination they bring in their wake meant I’d left it too late to buy a ticket in the same section as a group of Union-supporting friends. Which is why I was sitting alone.
“…[t]he fan is many. Along with thousands of other devotees he shares the certainty that we are the best, that all referees are crooked, that all adversaries cheat.” - Eduardo Galeano
It also turned out that reconnecting with the world was exhausting. What stores of social and emotional energy I had were depleted during the pandemic, and my social muscles - never particularly strong - had atrophied further during lockdown. By the autumn I’d hit a physical and creative wall which had metastasized a minor crisis of confidence. Which explains the quiet sobbing into my scarf before kick-off.
But I was jolted out of my self-indulgent rumination by a canary yellow deus ex machina in the shape of Dante Vanzeir and his tidy head-first finish. I wasn’t thinking about migraines or knee aches or writer’s block when I leapt into the arms of the stranger next to me. I wasn’t thinking of much at all, other than wasn’t it great that we scored and didn’t they suck terribly at football. It wasn’t quite Eduardo Galeano’s transcendental communal experience, but it was the closest I’d gotten to it in a long time. I was, in that brief embrace of ecstasy, letting football and Dante Vanzeir open me up to having, in Arthur Hopcraft’s words, my “spirit…be made rich or destitute by it.”
The rest of the game puttered along, Simon Adingra adding a second before Cercle got one back not long before the final whistle. The end of a football match was always a sombre affair for Eduardo Galeano. He regretted the fan’s reversion from the we and back to the lonely I, and thought that after a game the rest of the weekend slipped into a sort of melancholy torpor. But I left the Stade Marien bouncing on the balls of my feet, buoyed by my brief submission to collective delirium and the shock to my soul of that early goal. If Dante Vanzeir hadn’t quite converted me into a fanatic, he left me at least a few steps further along in my journey from beggar for good football to bona fide fan.
What I’ve been reading: Everyone loves a good defenestration, especially when the victim deserves it. Come for the Jonathan Liew takedown, stay for the story of the immolated ping-pong table.
What I’ve been watching: “I think I was born to be a footballer”. Liam “Chippy” Brady has been an ever-present on Irish TV as a pundit for as far back as I can remember. I’ve always known vaguely about his career, but a new RTE documentary out this week is a fantastic look back at his time at Arsenal and in Italy. Turns out he learned how to play football next door to my grandad’s parish church!