by Ian Herring »
02 Jun 2011 19:10
Interspas-less for a day or two so I thought I’d write this and post if I ever get back to the alternative world of disreason known as HNA. For those of you with the ‘I’m not reading all that’ virus alive in your circumlocutory-averse brains, feel free to move along. After a few days of reflection I thought I’d like to share a modicum of my thoughts in the wake of Swansea versus Reading.
What stands in my mind most of all is the period just after half-time when those wearing the colours of my adopted club, both on and off the pitch, took me by the throat and surprised me yet again. Football’s capacity to exemplify exaggerated extremes of tension, pride or emotion (or in this case, all three) in ways that never fail to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, showed itself in a way that shamed the sport’s lesser lights (see any example of ‘modern’ football passim, the list’s present league leaders being the trough-lickers and carpet-baggers of FIFA) and reminded me once again what it is the best of this sometimes rancid sport can offer whenever it is you think you’ve finally fallen way out of love with its excesses or its absurdities.
It was encapsulated in the vortex of noise that rose from the Reading end of the stadium as Jem Karacan’s goal-bound shot was deflected onto the woodwork by an outstretched Swansea foot and the follow-up that so nearly came off but was finally scrambled away in the manouvre known as ‘The Welsh Relief’. I’ve been at nearly all of this club’s pivotal money-shot moments over the past thirty years but not at any of them (and many of them have been sublime as any fan will know when things go well) that have made me experience a genuine sense of awe. If I could have captured that moment and stored it and sold it, it would make a bob or two on eBay I am pretty sure.
I never ever thought I’d hear such a visceral animal howl from a Reading crowd as I did at that precise moment. It was the moment of ‘the kill’, the bloodlust moment of the thrusting in of steel, much as you’d get at a bullfight in a corrida, the Swansea fans at the other end must have been sat frozen in momentary despair as the ball headed towards the goal in what must have seemed like slow motion as their seemingly unassailable lead had been collectively dismantled in the ten minutes or so just after half-time when our airborne crosses had scissored them just as their more lawn-level-based equivalents had done before half-time.
Known for our passivity and quietness in comparison to some sets of fans (Monday’s opponents included, they were loud and passionate when roused and no mistake, but no more than the media myths sometimes like to portray when they’re searching for some punchy copy), on this occasion something seemed to grip our fans collectively that I had not witnessed before en masse. Yes, many were ‘day-trippers’, or of the more modern type of fan often derided here (and I have spent my fair share of time deriding ‘modern’ football in full recidivist mode but there comes a time when you have to accept that the ‘old days’ are no more and even then, that you only have your own spin and take on them and that you should perhaps look around and see that others watch their football in a different light without being less of a fan than you or less ‘passionate’), but in that period after half-time each one of them rose and ‘joined the cause’ even without thinking as the intense whirlwind of Reading’s short revival rose and tore through the back-tracking panic of the Swans’ defence.
Goal one brought a semi-ironic cheer of some retained sense of residual hope. Goal two released a roar of returned belief and blood lust for the fight that made me (an old hand at this football supporting lark) shiver, and Karacan’s surge and drilled delivery, if it had gone in, would have released a bedlam of noise and insane celebration that would have knocked the Archie Lovell moment (two against Wolves in six minutes of injury time back at the beautiful old Elm Park) and the last gasp comeback in the play-offs at the Mad Stad against Wigan in ’01 (East Stand bloody shaking!) into a cocked hat. On those two occasions the air had split with a wall of sound I thought would never be bettered, yet, as the unfashionable and easy to knock Reading FC often manages to do just when it is least expected, it confounds your expectations and provides another wonderful memory you’ll never want to erase.
At that moment, no matter that Swansea probably had the ‘legs’ on us in terms of pace and youth, and no matter that they had found themselves a little further in front than a calmer assessment of the play might have concluded (we weren’t quite three goals worse than them over all after forty-five minutes and they weren’t entirely three goals ‘better’), I felt that if we had equalised then that the bullfight analogy would have been correct, and that to use unsubtle language, we would have gone on and ‘butchered’ them.
No, we weren’t technically better, and in terms of recent performances it wasn’t the best Reading display we’d seen for a while but sometimes sport transcends the technical and becomes gladiatorial and this was how it seemed just at that moment. On the pitch and in the vertiginous wrap and cowl of the new Wembley you could almost run your hands up and down the cold steel feel of the phrase ‘running in the sword’, and if the woodwork and an outstretched boot hadn’t have intervened then it’s hard to disagree with McDermott’s assessment of the same. I think Swansea would have ‘gone’, like a concussed boxer who’d taken a haymaker on the jaw, and we would have gone on to win, administering the coup-de-grace as our opponents fell apart.
But it wasn’t to be. And in the same light it doesn’t do to be churlish about certain matters. I have a personal dislike of some aspects of the Welsh that I can’t easily over-ride. I recall Swansea’s less party-like visits to Elm Park and visits to the Vetch that were, a-hem, ‘unwelcoming’, yet it would be foolish not to say ‘well done’. Fans have short memories. As Reading fans over the years we have been treated well by others when things have been on the up for us. Blackpool fans applauding us off the pitch when we’d put four past them on their own turf, Leicester fans congratulating us on promotion to the same league Swansea are looking forward to going into now (and I’m relieved we’re not, as I despise the Premier League), not so long ago. On the day Swansea deserved it and certainly did enough to shade it (Phil Dowd notwithstanding). As for those who have criticised Griffin and Kizanishvili for their performances on the day, I’d be interested to know if any of those posters where the same ones lauding them over the past few months for their experience and consistently solid performances in the bread and butter areas of the league where they contributed very strongly to our run that took us on to Wembley. Sometimes when you’re up against players younger than you they are going to be quicker, end of, and sometimes it happens on a big stage. As the tree-huggers say, ‘move on’.
As for Swansea? Good luck to them. Similar to us they have a ‘story’, leaner times and now a chance to have it out for a while with the millionaires. Much as I acknowledge my ‘comedy hatred’ of the Taffs, they were little different to us on the day as fans. It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a game where I have seen so many people genuinely excited, in high spirits and smiling before a game. I’m the last ‘happy-clappy’ exponent of the modern game you’ll ever meet, but even in losing on Monday, there was a very much a lot ‘right’ about the day. As with all racial stereotyping it’s easy to dislike a genus, easier to like the people when you meet them in person. Walking away from Wembley we met a few Swansea fans who were unfailingly polite and respectful and did not crow or give it large and were a pleasure to speak to. It would be mean-spirited not to wish them well.
But the abiding memory for me of the day is of yet another unsurpassable day spent supporting my football club. Over the years they have infuriated me, delighted me, frustrated me and brought me moments of insane inexplicable joy. The thought that ran through my mind was one I could not put my finger on until a few days later. Watching us play, seeing a whole half of Wembley stadium bedecked in hoops and blue and white, hearing that animal howl as the ‘equaliser’ pinged off the post, remaining to applaud the players and Brian McDermott off the pitch and seeing the (evident) disappointment on their faces, slowly filtered in.
The thought was the feeling of pride. Not the chest-out nonsense often associated with sport, but of knowing that the club I had started following all those years ago in its shabby, humble clothes had turned up here many years later, ‘suited-up’ at Wembley Stadium, once again, something unthinkable back then. But slightly different this time. In the Simod, and later against Bolton back in ’95 then we were all, to some extent, ‘day trippers’ back then, wide-eyed and amazed to be at Wembley, and certainly we were underdogs.
But something has happened to us since then. Something perhaps that someone might whisper in Madejski’s ear as a form of gratitude one day, when he has stepped down and our club is in more rapacious or less-caring hands, because it has been during his tenure that our club seems to have finally ‘come of age’. And that was what I could finally put my finger on after the disappointment had faded and some time to gather thoughts had kicked in.
At Wembley Stadium on the 30th May 2011, as, even though we had lost a game of football and yes, it bloody hurt, neither our players nor our supporters looked out of place in such grand surroundings for a single moment of the afternoon.
I for one am pretty proud of that. Long live ‘little old’ RFC.
(Apologies for the length of post.)
