#5 - A 43 minute multiverse

On the morning after the night before, snap reflections on Union Saint-Gilloise’s defeat to Brugge and loss of the Belgian league title…

Royal Union St Gilloise 1:3 Club Brugge

Stade Joseph Marien, Vorst

4 June, 2023

43 minutes. That was the time between Simon Adingra’s goal giving Union the lead and Club Brugge’s equalizer. 43 minutes when Union Saint-Gilloise were league champions. 43 minutes to think about the first title in 88 years. 43 minutes to stay in front, to not fuck up, to maybe score a second, and settle to the nerves. Whole lifetimes, alternate universes, can exist in 43 minutes. 

When Union scored, right at the beginning of the second half, the thing that we - or at least I - never, truly thought could happen, was happening. We lost our minds. And once we’d regathered them, thoughts started to drift off beyond the remaining 45 minutes of football to what would come next. What it might feel like to untie the anxious knot that’s settled itself into the pit of your chest. How we’re going to celebrate when the final whistle goes. Who’s going to be first to dodge the stewards and spark the pitch invasion that everyone knew was coming. How you might grab a bit of turf as a memento, whether the players might stay on the pitch or escape a mobbing by the Union Bhoys. If I’d get home in time to tell the kids, or if I’d get home at all. What I’d say to them in the morning, how I’d try to describe how it felt to see Union win the league for the first time in eight decades on a hot summer’s day in the Stade Marien, to be surrounded by 8,000 other people in yellow and blue who were equally trying to express their joy and their disbelief that such things as these could happen.

And that was just me, a fairweather fan. A blow-in “hipster cunt” attracted by the aura of Brussels’ most folksy club and their fairytale return to the top of Belgian football. A glory-hunter who’s only come to properly know the Marien and Union since the pandemic. 

Across the pitch from us, shaded from the sun by the only roof in the stadium, the men and women who’ve been with Union for half a century are imagining their own personal futures. People who grew up listening to the stories of their fathers and their grandfathers of a Marien bursting with 25,000 fans, of Union 60 and of three titles in three years. The fans who never abandoned Union even as they slumped to the fourth division and grass  grew between the empty terrace steps. Unionistes who thought success for the club only existed in those childhood reminiscences. For 43 minutes they were their fathers and their grandfathers. For 43 minutes they knew for certain that they had a legacy of their own, something to tell their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. That they were there on the greatest day of Union’s history, when the club that nearly disappeared became the champions of Belgium against everyone’s expectations. You can live many lifetimes in 43 minutes.

When Brugge’s Japanese substitute Shion Homma bundles the ball into the net 43 minutes after Union’s, he collapses all of these possible timelines and potential futures into one, lonely singularity. Defeat. 

Everything that follows is epilogue. 

The fairytale is not being written in Vorst but 100 kilometres away in Genk, by Toby Alderwiereld and Antwerp. A second Brugge goal goes in, and then a third. From champions to third place in 10 minutes. Union have been the underdogs for so long, maybe those winners' medals would have hung uneasily from their shoulders. Maybe winning the league would have been the end of a certain idea of Union - one the club has of itself and others of it too, not so much the beginning of a glorious era but the end of one. But Brugge scored 43 minutes after Union, and what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

When the game finishes players and fans slump into uncomprehending grief. After some time, Christian Burgess approaches the stand to salute the crowd, but all he can do is pinch the bridge of his nose and wipe the back of his hand across his eyes. Union’s ringleader Siebe Van der Heyden is next, clapping his hand to his chest in time with the chants of the crowd, his other arm in a sling. Teddy Teuma walks the length of the stand wearing just his underpants and boots and a hangdog look. 

There is a pitch invasion once the players have withdrawn to the changing rooms. Some people collapse onto the grass, others crouch in prayer. The pent-up emotion of some fans sublimates into a kind of anger, into exaggerated gestures and hard stares. Everyone is in a daze, what they'd envisaged as a triumphant storming of the field now just kabuki theatre. 

Who can blame them if their hearts aren’t in it. For 43 minutes we’d dreamed impossible dreams. But we live in a deterministic universe; what happened was always going to happen. Shion Homma was always going to score, Brugge was always going to win, and Union were always destined to come second, for the second year in a row. Still the underdog.

We can't explain it, we can only live it. 

See you in August, Union.