Four months after I started attending football matches, the English game sunk into a man-made hell. Hillsborough became one of those names like Hungerford, Lockerbie and later Dunblane. When we thought of it, we thought not of a location, but of a terrible event. Saying ‘Hillsborough’ conjured images not of grand old blue and white stripes, but of tearfully desperate Liverpudlians searching the pitch for their own. It prompted thoughts of that often repeated concept whose impact seems, if anything, to become harsher as the years pass and make it more remote and impossible: going to the match and never coming home.
On 10 December 1988 I went to Ayresome Park for the first time. I was six and, true to cliché, my dad lifted me over the turnstile for free. The selective recollections are all there. We climbed uneven steps cut among a grass mound towards a doorway in what appeared to be a barn. At that doorway my dad lifted me up again and I saw it for the first time: the felt-tip green, stretching in front like an interesting version of the farmers’ fields that surrounded our village. The pitch was partitioned from the stand by a red mesh fence, the central part of which had a topping of brass spikes. We took a place near the back of the Holgate End, me sitting on the crush barrier, dad holding me there and watching the game over my shoulder. From up there I could see the bobbing heads of a thousand men. Several times during the match, the heads swapped places, some landing a good distance away from where they started. They reminded me of the way baked beans splodge from the pan on to a plate.
When Boro scored, which they did three times, I was both frightened and exhilarated. The roar was deafening but thrilling, and the way everyone bumped into each other like dodgems I found disturbing but funny. The game finished and everyone moved quickly towards two or three exits. I could only see the backsides of the people in front so I remember looking at the feet of those around me. They seemed to shuffle and scuff along as quickly as was possible given the heavy swarm of bodies. Looking upwards I saw many hands urging on the person in front by a quick nudge of the waist. A new rush of other supporters joined from behind, boisterously geeing on the pack. Space tightened and my dad just managed to hoist me on to his shoulders. Behind his unalarmed expression was both paternal stoicism and the experienced mental shrug of a football fan in the 1980s – this was just how things were. When Ayresome Park spat us on to the streets, almost immediately I forgot about how scared I had been and pestered my dad to take me again soon.
A month after the horrors of Hillsborough, Middlesbrough played there. Tarpaulin was draped across the closed Leppings Lane End fence, but if supporters craned their necks they could see buckled crush barriers. In front of the haunted terrace the players trampled over grass that had seen all the sadness of a Flanders field. Boro lost 1-0 and were relegated. It should not have mattered, it should not have even been played, but still thousands of Teessiders travelled to the game. Though buoyed on my journey by football’s resolve, this is an episode I find hard to fathom. Surely the rest of the season should have been cancelled?
On the train to Carlisle, I telephone my dad. Three days ago, the Hillsborough Independent Panel published its findings. Even the unshakable are shocked. Those who cited cover-up and conspiracy and were labelled attention seekers or cranks are vindicated, though their victory is pyrrhic. Those within and without football are gripped and emotional, save for the man across the aisle from me who this morning is reading the Sun. I ask my dad how football could have continued. ‘We just expected something like this to happen, really. It was how you were treated at football. So we were devastated, but not surprised.’ We discuss South Yorkshire at that time and we can’t help but talk of the police force that altered 116 of its statements and took blood samples from dead children in search of alcohol. As any left-leaning Yorkshireman will tell you, this was the same force that perpetrated class war against its own at Orgreave and elsewhere.
From the comfortable position of 2012, Hillsborough looks like the consequence of class war too. Even though it must have contained thousands of Thatcher’s valued working-class voters, the public that went to football matches was an enemy of her government. To them it was a single group of hoodlums and Labour voters that tore up cities when it was not tearing itself up. The casual hooligan movement spoke for all fans. It behaved like animals, and so it should be put in pens and fenced in. In that government’s eyes, the football public had transformed from the mixed crowds of the 1970s and before, to the violent creatures of the 1980s that needed fences to stop them running riot. That grounds being fence-free had prevented disasters in the past was lost on them. The football public was deigned faceless and treated to authoritarian rule. That is why Hillsborough was not a surprise.
Ninety-six deaths were the culmination of this and football’s tipping point. We know that the partially implemented Taylor Report gave us all-seated stadiums. Though I long for the architecture and atmosphere of old, I am inherently grateful that most of my football watching has been safe and that there will never be another Hillsborough. However, big football missed an opportunity in the early 1990s. It could have been re-built with the fans at its core. Instead, the faceless masses were hastily bought by television and their game marketed out of its hole. It should have been slowly and soundly constructed by those fans according to their wishes. We would have liked safe standing, involvement in the running of our clubs and affordable ticket prices.
Thankfully the spirit of old imbued with the safety of new exists, as I have seen time and again this season. Outside Carlisle’s Brunton Park home I watch two Swindon fans joke with a police officer, unthinkable until Hillsborough. ‘We got the train up, actually mate. It’s better, innit? You can walk around a bit, have a wee.’ At ten to three I rest upon a silver terrace barrier and look across at the hulking modern stand opposite. Very few people have elected to sit in its eight or nine personality free blocks. Here once stood the Scratching Shed, a pitch-long terrace liked so much that its official name became the Popular Side. Its replacement, built upon delusion and absurd promises, is a breathing metaphor for a very modern broken dream. It is also longer than the pitch, overlapping the butt of Carlisle’s now-closed traditional away end terrace, the Waterworks End. Behind the other goal is Brunton Park’s beating, baying heart, the Warwick Street End. With its mossy zigzag roof and orange lighting, ‘The Warwick’ remains recognisable and unique. It conjures nostalgia now but once did the same with fear. In the 1970s, Peter Bonetti of Chelsea was stoned from the Warwick and Pat Jennings of Spurs heard a dart whistle by his ear.
My own artful terrace runs to the correct dimensions. Behind it is a small but refined tier of seating that constitutes the main stand. This replaced the original in the early 1950s following a fire with chilling similarities to Valley Parade’s. Mercifully, full-time had long gone when it caught fire following a 1953 friendly with Falkirk, as had the supporters. Discarded cigarette stubs ignited years of litter beneath the stand and a prevailing wind carried the flames across its wooden floors and seats. If only football had learned its lessons like it did following Hillsborough. Not many mourned the stand’s loss. Manager Ivor Broadis had once described it as ‘reeling drunkenly under the weight of its years,’ while his successor Bill Shankly plumped for ‘a glorified chicken coop.’
Brunton Park’s appearance and historical name-checks like Broadis and Shankly whisper of a fine vintage here. The club was founded in 1904 in a Temperance hotel. For a time they had fierce rivals in their battle for local affections in the guise of Carlisle Red Rose. United tugged most at the city’s heartstrings, roared to success in the Cumberland League by early crowds of 5,000 people. They joined the Lancashire League and soon won its second division before finishing as runners-up to Everton in its first. In 1910 the northern upstarts went to West Ham in the FA Cup and dominated. They could muster only a draw. West Ham paid them £160 and half the gate not to play the replay in Cumbria and won it 5-0 in East London. It was just as well: that year, United nearly went bust and were saved only by supporter fundraising and a donation from Newcastle United. The frontier club, not quite sure where it belonged, soon joined the North-Eastern League and by the 1920s was prospering. They finished second in 1927-28, which allowed them to stand for election to the Football League. Few thought they would get enough votes with clubs repelled by the cost and distance of playing in England’s extreme north. Football knew better than that, and perhaps even fancied the novelty. Carlisle United were voted in.
United won their first ever league fixture 3-2 at Accrington Stanley. Their first goal was scored by Jimmy McConnell, a new signing. A newspaper report described how he:
... suddenly, without warning, unleashed a terrific shot which flew into the top corner of the goal, causing those gathered behind the Stanley keeper to stoop down in fear of the ball bursting through the net and taking off their heads.
Born in Ayr, McConnell had reached Carlisle via a nomadic phase in the United States. There he played for Springfield Babes, Providence Clamdiggers and Bethlehem Steel. The lure of Cumbria was greater than that of romantic team names, and in any case McConnell’s goals ensured love was in the Brunton air. ‘The goals he scored,’ said teammate George ‘Ginger’ Harrison, ‘illuminated his life and that of thousands of others.’ McConnell scored forty-two goals that season, and in total 126 in 150 Carlisle games, including fourteen hat-tricks. His reward for becoming the first United player to 100 was a three-piece Chesterfield suite. Emotional bonuses came from his peers within the game, particularly the great Dixie Dean of Everton. Following an unlucky 4-2 FA Cup reverse for Carlisle at Goodison, Dean described McConnell as ‘a phenomenal goalscorer with more pace and ability than I ever had.’ As always at Carlisle, a city without industrial takings to sate the coffers, money was short in McConnell’s time. He was sold to Crewe in 1932, his strike partners Davie Hutchison and Sammy Armes to Luton and Chester, all three of them teams we know well.
The 1930s were grim for Carlisle. In 1934-35 their captain Bob Bradley died suddenly at home, and his club finished bottom of the whole league. Two years later, defender Jack Round passed away during a routine appendix operation. Football’s suspension at the start of the Second World War stopped the rot at Carlisle United. At conflict’s end they regrouped under Ivor Broadis, a twenty-three-year-old player-manager who would go on to play fourteen times for England. Broadis had wider ambitions and sold himself to Sunderland. His replacement was a former United player and serving director’s nephew, Bill Shankly. Nepotism has its positives.
In Shankly’s first job as a manager the charisma and erudition that would mark him out at Liverpool stirred. He immediately set about changing the culture of the club and ensuring Carlisle had only players and staff with the attitude and ethics that marked his kind of socialism, ‘everyone working for each other’. Involving himself immediately, Shankly moved into a house next to the ground and jogged its neighbouring streets every morning. He persuaded the club to buy properties in the same area for new and young players to rent, and to build a clubhouse in which they could socialise. The Scot prowled the streets of the city centre canvassing views and opinions on his club from residents. Fifteen minutes before each game he would take control of the Brunton Park public address system and explain his team selections to fans, updating them too on club news. On the pitch, average players were made to feel anything but. He cajoled them into earning a 0-0 draw at Highbury in the FA Cup, a game they might even have won. Five thousand away supporters saw United winger Billy Hogan tear strips from Arsenal that day, provoking them to select him for special treatment in the replay. After that match, a 4-1 defeat, Shankly reflected how:
It was a great shame they felt the need to kick Billy Hogan into the terracing. I felt we could have given them a good game up here ... I’m very disappointed, not at losing, but at the way Arsenal resorted to acts of thuggery.
Shanks’ work was noticed. Grimsby Town fluttered a player budget that Carlisle never could, and he took the next steps on a road marked ‘Greatness’. He died in, you guessed it, 1981.
Shankly’s last season as Liverpool manager, 1973-74, was one of Carlisle’s greatest. Under another former player, Alan Ashman, they were promoted to Division One. They even met Shankly’s side in the FA Cup, achieving a 0-0 draw at Anfield before the Scot came to memory lane for the replay and won 2-0 in front of 21,000 Cumbrians. Ashman was a magician and another man to find himself deeply affected by Carlisle, place and team. While a player, the club had tried to sell him. Unable to think of a life elsewhere, Ashman took a job on a chicken farm instead. His Carlisle was a team built on long periods of possession and killer-punch goals. They finished third behind Middlesbrough and Luton, pipping Orient to their place in the sun.
If the game of football had ended at 5 p.m. on 24 August 1974, the people of Carlisle may not have minded too much. At that point they were top of England’s highest division. On the season’s first day United won 2-0 at Stamford Bridge (before the match, Chelsea chairman Brian Mears had boasted how his club’s giant new stand ‘cost three, maybe four, times as much as the Carlisle side’). They followed up with a midweek win at Ayresome Park and, on that glorious 24th, a 1-0 home defeat of Spurs. Carlisle United had touched the sky, but only with their fingertips: they finished bottom of the division.
By 1981-82 Bob Stokoe’s trilby and raincoat hung on the manager’s peg at Brunton Park. Carlisle had fallen further from the clouds, to Division Three. In the second of his three spells, Stokoe led the side to promotion behind Burnley. After a storming start, inspired by the hunched genius of a soon-to-depart Peter Beardsley, Stokoe’s side faltered. They stumbled over the line with a final-day win at bottom club Chester. Promotion was a temporary reprieve. By 1988, Carlisle were back in Division Four, and by 1992 in the ownership of Michael Knighton, to a generation the bloke with the moustache who did kick-ups at Old Trafford.
The Champions League notions on which the stand opposite me today was built were Knighton’s. His megalomania tarnished a club already suffering the reputational difficulties of distance and separation. Outsiders who presumed Carlisle an oddity in the middle of no man’s land nodded knowingly when Knighton made himself head coach, declaring: ‘I have more qualifications than most managers and coaches at this level put together.’ Knighton is long gone and the club has clawed back the respect its support and tradition deserves, sinking to the Conference, but now in English football’s third tier, probably its rightful place.
When the blue and whites of Carlisle emerge with Swindon Town’s all-reds, the king-size stand is less than half full. Three hundred of its occupants are from Swindon, one per mile for the distance between the two places. It is functional and cold, a hangar with plastic seats. No wonder most head for the terraces. The dormant Waterworks End looks sadly on to the pitch. By way of grabbing attention from the populated areas, Eddie Stobart haulage videos flash from its big screen. The homely smell of frying onions coats me in nostalgia. I look around and recognise feet and legs that recall Ayresome. Most have on trainers and jeans. The side view returns several beer guts, their frequency a more modern development (if you have to watch those images of Hillsborough again, note how skinny by comparison fans back then were). Most people lean on barriers with their hands clasped in front of them as if praying. Those without anything to lean on keep their arms crossed until a player’s endeavour merits un-crossing. The supporters have gathered, mostly in gangs of two or three, though some are larger and many are alone. Very few of the gangs arrived together and I imagine met through their liking for a similar spot, possibly because Carlisle won handsomely the Saturday they first stood there. A high number of the lone fans have satchels and plastic carriers at their feet holding flasks. Because the autumn sun is so lofty, everyone has a stretched shadow that seems to populate the gaps and make the stand feel full. Looking at the shadows alone it is possible to imagine yourself at any point over the last century.
For the first half-hour vuvuzelas whine along like emasculated foghorns until the children parping them lose interest and begin instead to sing ‘wanker, wanker, wanker’ at Swindon’s Italian manager. They have been provoked by his rampant gesticulations.
In prime footballing conditions upon a perfect pitch, Carlisle and Swindon spend the opening ten minutes acting like two gentlemen who will not enter a doorway first for fear of offending one another. Neither holds on to the ball. When possession is achieved it is quickly surrendered as if from embarrassment. Then a Carlisle defender barges through the nonsense and punts a long ball forward, towards the vacant Waterworks End. It bashes off a counterpart and into the orbit of a home striker. He too cuts the niceties and ploughs the ball into the net. One-nil. Celebrations comprise applause more than wild bounces of joy, perhaps because a goal among such timidity has come as a shock. On the dusky cinder track between stand and pitch, the away manager turns to his bench staff and delivers a combustible soliloquy. Swindon respond well to the back of his head. They begin a tentative friendship with the ball that graduates to infatuation. Soon their ten outfield players are all in the Carlisle half, possession semi-permanent. The shots they aim on goal are full of effort rather than guile, though United’s keeper darts around his box like cotton wool in the wind. Sensing the opportunity to snap him in motion or the coming of a Swindon goal, a photographer swaps ends. His bright bib gives the away side’s Irn Bru-topped striker a marker at which to aim. When the ball bounces outside the penalty area he guides it with precision into the photographer’s corner of the net. It is such a good goal and they are so far away that it takes Swindon cheers a while to surface and travel. I’m sure I hear the net ripple before they do, which is attributable either to heightened senses on such a vigorous day or a brain frazzled by nigh on a year’s travelling football.
The hails are immediate and hearty when Carlisle go ahead again a minute later. Their squat striker, whose ten-to-two feet move surprisingly fast, chests the ball towards his lanky partner. He choreographs his body as if mocking up a coaching textbook and riots in a half-volley the Swindon keeper can only wave at. The goal is a shock, hence the wild roar. Swindon’s dominance and then equaliser had cynical home minds dreading a gubbing. ‘You watch,’ said a man behind me, ‘they’ll dick us 4-1 here.’ The carnival quickly leaves town as Swindon make it two-all 120 seconds later. The fourth goal in eighteen minutes comes when a hopeful pass that bobsleighs down the gulley strikes a Carlisle defender’s heel, setting clear Swindon’s second forward. He motors goalwards with the freedom of Cumbria, lures the keeper and bulges the net. After barely half an hour, the game’s scoring is over. Another week; another flash flood then thirsty drought. As if to torture us with the prospect of more goals there is a pinball scramble just before half-time. Carlisle should score, but a header thuds against an Eddie Stobart hoarding, prompting the familiar agony of a ‘Yeeeeaaaah’ turning into an ‘haaaawwww’.
The half-time whistle peeps and Morrissey’s ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’ soon strikes up. Both managers walk from the touchline over the cinder and stop and consult quickly with their coaches. Mozza sings of walking on damp beaches towards wooden benches. I could quite imagine him here; Carlisle and Brunton Park has that melancholy about it, forever longing for and smiling over a time gone by. Beneath upright toilet brush floodlights a pretty couple kiss, her reaching upwards from the terrace step below him. There is a certain romance here, appealing even if its nostalgia is more 1970s sideburns than succulent sepia. I drink a swift half beneath the main stand in a box room with strip lights known as the George McVitie Bar. McVitie, I learn from frames charting his career, was a flying right-winger who, like so many here, left for pastures new but soon came back. It strikes me again what a hold Carlisle United seem to have had on players and managers. No one, it feels, can keep away from this peculiar northern temptress.
At the second-half’s start I find a spot alongside the halfway line. It proves to be a wise choice as the ball spends most of its time in the central third of the pitch. Both sides will it forward manfully, but attacks repeatedly end with pass-backs rolled for goalkeepers to batter into the deepening sky. In particular, I like the Carlisle keeper’s kicking method. He seems to scoop his foot into the earth and dig the ball out, a nine-iron for a right foot. His whole style is entertaining, his bravery vintage. Where there is doubt he asserts his fists or charges forward with scant regard for his personal safety. It is noisier here. To my left are a disparate group of four or five, a Saturday family. One, a lady in her seventies sporting a perm and purple fleece, is no fan of Swindon’s touchline griper. ‘Oh shurrup will yer. Moaning on like that. You’d think we’d shot their right-back.’ Her neighbour, folded T-shirt arms and creased forehead, grows quickly tired of the referee’s frequent whistle. ‘Don’t get involved, man. Let the game bloody flow. He thinks he’s a bloody shepherd, this fella.’ Providing consistent rhythm behind their sporadic outbursts is a man with the unfortunate hair of Noel Edmunds. Every minute or so he implores his team to ‘waken up, for Christ’s sake.’ On top of natural passive aggression, there is something about the Carlisle accent that makes many sentences sound sceptical or scathing. It crescendos high from calm beginnings like applying helium to a mid-sentence Geordie. Strangely, it isn’t a million miles from the Teesside accent, a fact that has long confused me.
After Swindon sustain an attacking period more reluctant than relentless but fail to score, their manager fizzes. He frequently rips his hands from the pockets of his jacket, sending it flapping behind him. ‘Oh Mama bloody Mia’ says the old girl, then, strangely: ‘pizza or pasta?’ Carlisle revive towards the end, speeding forward on the break. A fine cross dangles and is picked from the air by a silky header. Hands un-cup and rise to ear-height, and mouths open. It grenades past a Warwick End post and a settlement of two-all is reached. The away governor runs across the pitch to take Wiltshire accolades. ‘He thinks he’s Frank Sinatra, that bloke,’ says someone as we shuffle through the gates. Behind the familiar-looking Swindon Town team bus a young boy in full Carlisle kit swings on the statue of Hugh McIlmoyle, an adored centre-forward with three spells here among his vital statistics. Another captivated by the strange magic of Brunton Park, where the clocks move faster than time.
I walk back into the city centre along wide, tree-lined pavements. There can be few more pleasant routes to and from a football ground. The long stretch from Brunton Park is padded by terraced villas with musty orange and dirty-tooth white bricks that together achieve an attractive crocheted effect. On one of them is a blue plaque commending the former home of Thomas Woodrow, ‘Grandfather of Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of United States of America.’ To make such a leap is difficult after a Carlisle United versus Swindon Town game, but it again reaffirms the many small parts that helped the provinces alter history.
I pass the Lonsdale Cinema whose sad show list reads ‘Closed’, then a headline board in the News & Star office proclaiming ‘Callous Carer Jailed’. There are some stunning buildings here, as you would expect in a place of such maturity. ‘The City is strong, but small, the buildings old, but the streets fair, the great church is a venerable old pile,’ wrote Daniel Defoe in 1724. Opposite omnipotent Nando’s is an erect cannon, used to defend Carlisle against Scottish invasion in 1745 and afterwards according to its plaque, ‘as morning and evening gun whilst Carlisle remained a fortified town.’ This split-shift weapon tells you much about this city and the defensive mentality that long pervaded, and perhaps still does. John Crofts, a merchant from Bristol, wrote in 1759 how Carlisle was ‘a small deserted dirty city, poorly built and poorly inhabited ... the cathedral is miserably ragged and dirty inside and out.’
Regular invasion meant that there was little point in making Carlisle beautiful and scant attraction in living behind the fortified walls of a military target. Once the Romans left what they called Luguvalium, a fort town at the extreme north-west of their Empire, it became fair game in the eyes of all who wished to rule these isles, or merely fancied a brawl. Where now proximity to Hadrian’s Wall makes Carlisle somewhere for American tourists to stop for a cream horn, for 1,500 years it meant a town worth possessing. It fluctuated between English and Celtic rule, with occasional Viking and other interludes. The only constant was brutality. In 1322, Harcla, put in charge of Carlisle by King Edward, attempted to make a pact with Robert the Bruce and bring peace to Carlisle. Edward’s men arrested him for treason and sentenced him to be:
... hanged and afterwards beheaded; to be disembowelled and his entrails burnt; his head to be taken and suspended on the Tower of London; his body to be divided into four parts, one part to be suspended on the tower of Carlisle, another at Newcastle-on-Tyne, a third at Bristol and the fourth at Dover.
Three months after his death, the English signed a peace treaty with Bruce. At least Harcla got to see Dover. The Bishop of Carlisle responded to peacetime in the only way he knew how: he requested a tax rebate from the Pope, on the grounds that the Scots had ‘slain men and women ... and destroyed the whole county.’ Peace did not last long, which probably meant another set of forms for the bishop to complete. As if armies sacking Carlisle were not enough, Border clans from either side of Hadrian’s Wall turned their areas into bandit territories. These ‘Reivers’ regularly nipped into their neighbouring country to steal cattle and violently extort money. Their dalliances ended only with a peace won by the cannons of 1745, and the development of Carlisle’s weaving industry as a provider of income that did not involve robbery or kidnap.
What the people of Carlisle were able to earn as weavers still left them skint. A visitor in 1846 despairingly described the way of life typical to them:
On what do these people live? Oatmeal gruel forms their breakfast; potatoes with dripping or the liquid fat from a little morsel of bacon, their dinner; and either a drink of beer (so small that it is sold at a penny a gallon!) or a mere drink called ‘tea’ is taken with bread as the evening meal ... a man saunters in the lanes or into the fields, rather than show his tatters and threadbare habit in church or chapel.
The poor here would not have recognised such a hopeless profile. Frequently they rebelled and rioted against their lot, the spirit of their fighting forefathers employed for more positive use than defending a monarch’s outpost or a despot’s target. A Conservative parliamentary candidate, Sir Philip Musgrave, came here to court popularity in 1826. His views on the Corn Laws sparked a piece of direct action in which he was placed on a loom and taught to weave. The rest of his party were ducked in a mill-dam. Sir Robert Peel, Home Secretary, responded by creating a police force for Carlisle. When the city’s weavers found out its leader had assisted in the Peterloo Massacre, they rioted again. As lords of a former citadel, the authorities were in the fortunate position of having troops on tap to quell disorder. Their public relations record was not great: during the same 1826 riot they fired shots in the air and killed a woman watching from an upstairs window.
In these generally quiet and complicit times of ours, it is always hard to imagine such boisterousness and refusal to accept the order of things. I feel this keenly in Carlisle, which though busy this early evening, is sleepily calm. The buildings are low, trees and greenery abundant, the streets wide and the traffic sparse. People are neither chat-on-corners merry nor scowling and unapproachable. It is a middle-of-the-road kind of place, which probably has much to do with its location and historically confused identity.
Where the main pedestrianised shopping street unfolds into a large square with outdoor cafe seating included, I survey the city noticeboard. There are adverts for a recent gig by The Temperance Seven, beardy jazzists judging by the accompanying photograph, a coffee morning and, of course, An Evening of Clairvoyance at the deaf centre. I get the feeling that Carlisle is a small town masquerading as a city, its long history tiresome and a burden. It has too much to live up to; it just wants to be a market town. I walk by the erratically beautiful, old town hall and arrive at the cathedral, a sharp upright building. It too feels uneasy, crammed on to a bit of grass behind a shopping centre.
A frontier city so far from others, of varied ancestry and uneasy in itself, Carlisle can seem as if it is hell-bent upon avoiding eye contact with the rest of England. It must feel difficult to belong to a country run from afar. Historically, governance brought only invasion, then control through the nationalisation of pubs to curb rowdy bomb factory workers, reversed only in 1971. More recently Foot and Mouth disease, then flooding, must have made Carlisle wonder what England had ever done for it. Attitudes to the football club have helped shaped a narrative I am guilty of swallowing – football’s final frontier. Witness this from Brian James’s 1977 book, Journey to Wembley:
Nothing moves out there. It is a football frontier post guarded by sheep; the notion that a ball kicked over the fence would go on bouncing until it dropped off the end of the world is hard to shake off ... Carlisle, the Alice Springs of league soccer, is a place that demands gradual acclimatisation if a team is not to suffer from football’s equivalent of the bends.
Perhaps, though, the point of Carlisle and Carlisle United is to offer a true definition of that quality England claims to hold so dear: eccentricity. City and team are, in some ways, an implausibility, out on an edge, difficult to find reason to visit or move to. Yet they are England as much as anywhere else and fought harder than most to be so. Besides, wee Brunton Park on a Saturday afternoon is a marvellous place to be.