Shankly's Football Fallacy

I first heard on Saturday evening. I hadn't gone to the game myself as I'd arranged to go to see Crystal Palace play Hull with my dad before the date and time of the tie was announced. My parents don't have ESPN, so I was planning to listen to the second half on the journey back from South London to Hampshire. I tuned in first to Five Live, then Talksport, but couldn't hear any commentary. I was about to put on a CD instead when the Talksport anchor said something along the lines of "and now we return to White Hart Lane for the latest on the very worrying events that have unfolded there". At first there was that acute tinge of excitement that hits you when you know you're about to hear some big news, that something extraordinary has happened. The heart quickens as the mind zips through the possibilities like a flick book. Crowd disturbance? Horror tackle? Suddenly, the flick book stops abruptly on a page where three words are written in bold, stark lettering. The excitement turns into a sickening dread. Those words are Marc Vivien Foe.

We were given a brief description of events from an audibly shaken Ian Abrahams and told that Fabrice had already been taken to hospital. The game had been abandoned by Howard Webb and supporters had made their way out of the ground quietly, respectfully, solemnly. Ian had said that an "eerie silence" had descended on the Lane while Fabrice was being attended to by medical staff on the pitch. For six minutes the 35,000 or so men, women and children had watched helplessly as a young man fought for his life on the pitch.

We love football for the drama; it is our escape from real life. Football is improvised pantomime; we cheer our heroes, we boo and hiss at the villainous opponents and evil referee. We go to football to experience strong emotions. To do so we need to convince ourselves of football’s ultimate importance and we do just that. In our collective delusion we scream in ecstasy when our teams score and weep when they are eliminated in a penalty shoot out. But our emotions, strong as they are (or appear to be) are experienced within very strict parameters. We experience heartbreak and devastation when our team is relegated in the same way we experience fear during a horror film; it is really only a simulacrum of the true feelings. But football is far more convincing than the movies. We are there, in the midst of the drama, even part of the drama. Its hold over us is mesmeric, the illusion unbreakable. Almost.

Rarely, in the soap opera that is football, we experience events that fall beyond those parameters which shatter the illusion. Reality encroaches on our sanctuary and renders football, with its diluted emotions, exposed as the unimportant, insignificant game that it is. The result is not the theatrical wailing of fans of relegated sides on the last day of the season, but the blank, confused faces we saw at Tottenham on Saturday evening of people forced to comprehend the triviality of the game they believed, until a few moments ago, was the be all and end all.

Bill Shankly is famously quoted as saying “Football isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s much more important than that” – a phrase that has come to embody the false importance we attribute to football. On Saturday, at White Hart Lane, that ultimate sporting fallacy was, at last, laid to rest.