Among the Thugs

The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle tea-bags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they’ve forgotten to do.

In January 1990, I attended an evening match played by Cambridge United, in the small, exposed Abbey Stadium on the edge of town. The match was one of the final rounds of the FA Cup, a knock-out competition that the Cambridge team—at the time in the Fourth Division—had survived longer than its supporters could have reasonably expected. The match was a replay: three days before Cambridge United had met Millwall for the first time, making the historic journey to the Den, and had come away with a draw. Tonight’s match would decide which team went into the quarter-finals. No Fourth Division team had got beyond the quarter-finals.

I entered the ground and found myself among the supporters pressed up against the fence near the half-way line. It took some minutes before I could get to a position where I could watch the game without being obstructed, and once there I retained possession of my spot by holding on to the perimeter rail. I was on my own. On my left was a man of about fifty, a face full of friendly creases, smelling strongly of American cigarettes, with ash eyebrows and tobacco-stained teeth. Behind me were three lads—one, to keep his balance, rested his forearm on my shoulders. On my right was a woman with her boy-friend; she was in her twenties with short blonde hair and was pressed into my side. Others—children, police, the stadium stewards—were having to squeeze past constantly, as access to the pitch was through a locked gate in front of me.

I was not a supporter of the Cambridge team; I was there out of curiosity (it was Millwall’s first visit to the city), but I surprised myself by how engaged I became by the match. In a matter of minutes, I was cheering, even singing, along with everyone else—my voice, slightly high-pitched, as foreign sounding to me as the voices around me. I groaned when the crowd groaned, and when it surged in one direction, and we all had to tumble with it, I instinctively reached out for the people near me, clinging to stay upright. And when the crowd surged back again and we all tumbled back with it, I found that these same people were reaching out for me. Having just walked in from the street, I had stepped into a situation of unusual intimacy, and while I hadn’t said more than a few words to the people near me—we were pressed too closely together to have a conversation—something was being communicated between us. Something, I felt, was being communicated between everyone there: just about every member of that crowd of nine thousand people was pressed closely against someone else, and was held, as we were held, tightly together, waiting for a goal.

In the opening minutes, it seemed that we might see one. Millwall was then in the First Division, but it was the Cambridge team that was dominating the game, although not with much finesse. Its players were aggressive and had little style, but they were tenacious and seldom lost possession of the ball. They were the ones making the shots on goal. In the first three minutes, the Millwall goalkeeper had to make two dramatic saves, including one in which he got his hand up to send the ball inches over the net at the last possible moment. Two minutes later, the ball was slammed against the post. Ten minutes later, another was slammed against the crossbar.

I watched the goalkeeper. His name was Keith Branagan, and this was his first match against Cambridge, his former team, since it had traded him to Millwall for a large sum of money—the largest that the Cambridge club had got for one of its players. There might have been a hidden agenda—Branagan out to show his former supporters what they had lost—although it was more likely that, being an exceptional goalkeeper, he simply played exceptionally. With Cambridge United firing so insistently at the goal, Branagan was emerging as the most conspicuous talent on the pitch. After a while I felt there was more to it: that there was some mysterious force at work around his goal—something greater than Branagan’s talent—that was preventing the ball from entering it. I felt that the ball would never enter the net and that it would be unnatural if it did.

There was no score in the first half, and during the interval everyone on the terraces relaxed visibly. There was more room; without the excitement, the supporters seemed to diminish in size. They had stopped moving around, and there was no need to cling to anyone for support. To have touched someone now would have been wrong. A conversation would have been possible, but a conversation did not seem right either. I had nothing more than the most perfunctory exchanges with the people near me. Friends and partners were the only ones speaking. Strangers had become strangers again. Our privacy had been reclaimed.

The second half started off in the same spirit as the first forty-five minutes—brutal and ineffective. United’s play was relentless, but it was difficult to see how, at this pace, its players would last out the match. They were very physical—and responsible for most of the fouls—and if they didn’t score within the first fifteen minutes I didn’t believe that they would score later. They would be exhausted; they would be lucky to hold on to a goal-less draw. That was what it would be: another goal-less draw.

The game, so far, was what I had learned to describe as good English football. There was nothing unusual about it or the crowd. In fact, although the match was an important one for the Cambridge side, it was, in every other respect, a provincial affair, an ordinary night out in the middle of the week in January. Even the size of the crowd was ordinary—if not less than ordinary: the Abbey Stadium is the smallest in the league, its capacity no more than twenty per cent of the larger First Division grounds. And yet, there was little that was actually ordinary about the experience.

It is not uncommon, in any sport, to see spectators behaving in a way that would be uncharacteristic of them in any other context: embracing, shouting, swearing, kissing, dancing in jubilation. It is the thrill of the sport, and expressing the thrill is as important as witnessing it. But there is no sport in which the act of being a spectator is as constantly physical as watching a game of English football on the terraces. The physicalness is insistent; any observer not familiar with the game would say that it is outright brutal. In fact, those who do not find it brutal are those so familiar with the traditions of attending an English football match, so certain in the knowledge of what is expected of them, that they are incapable of seeing how deviant their behaviour is—even in the most ordinary things. The first time I attended White Hart Lane on my own, everyone made for the exit within seconds of the match ending: I looked at the thing and couldn’t imagine an exit more dangerous—an impossibly narrow passageway with very steep stairs on the other side. There was no waiting; there was also no choice, and this peculiar mad rush of people actually lifted me up off my feet and carried me forward. I had no control over where I was going. Stampede was the word that came to mind. I was forced up against the barrier, danger looming on the other side, was crushed against it, wriggled sideways to keep from bruising my ribs, and then, just as suddenly, was popped out, stumbling, as the others around me stumbled, to keep from falling down the remaining stairs. I looked up behind me: everyone was grimacing and swearing; someone, having been elbowed in the face, was threatening to throw a punch. What was this all about? This was not an important moment in the game: it was the act of leaving it. This, I thought, is the way animals behave, but the thought was not a metaphoric one. This was genuinely the way animals behave—herd animals. Sheep behave this way—cattle, horses.

At the heart of any discussion about crowds is the moment when many, many different people cease being many, many different people and become only one thing—a crowd. There is the phrase, becoming ‘one with the crowd’. In part, it is a matter of language: when the actions of diverse individuals are similar and coherent enough that you must describe them as the actions of one body, with a singular subject and a singular verb. They are . . . It is . . . The many people are . . . The crowd is . . . The English football game expects the spectator to become one with the crowd; in a good football game, a game with ‘atmosphere’, the spectator assumes it: it is one of the things he has paid for. But, even here, it is more than an ordinary crowd experience.

It is an experience of constant physical contact and one that the terraces are designed to concentrate. The terraces look like animal pens and, like animal pens, provide only the most elementary accommodation: a gate that is locked shut after the spectators are admitted; a fence to keep them from leaving the area or spilling on to the pitch; a place for essential refreshment—to deal with elementary thirst and hunger; a place to pee and shit. I recall attending the Den at Millwall, the single toilet facility overflowing, and my feet slapping around in the urine that came pouring down the concrete steps of the terrace, the crush so great that I had to clinch my toes to keep my shoes from being pulled off, horrified by the prospect of my woollen socks soaking up this cascading pungent liquid still warm and steaming in the cold air. The conditions are appalling but essential: it is understood that anything more civilized would diffuse the experience. It seems fitting that, in some grounds, once all the supporters have left in their herd-like stampede, the terraces are cleaned by being hosed down: again, not just the images but the essential details are those of an animal pen. That is what the terraces offer, not just the crowd experience but the herd experience with more intensity than any other sport, with more intensity than any other moment in a person’s life—week after week.

Here, in Cambridge, on a Tuesday night, me a stranger among strangers: the physicalness was constant; it was inescapable—unless you literally escaped by leaving. You could feel, and you had no choice but to feel, every important moment of play—through the crowd. A shot on goal was a felt experience. With each effort, the crowd audibly drew in its breath, and then, after another athletic save, exhaled with equal exaggeration. And each time, the people around me expanded, their rib cages noticeably inflating, and we were pressed more closely together. They had tensed up—their arm muscles flexed slightly and their bodies stiffened, or they might stretch their necks forward, trying to determine in the strange, shadowless electronic night-light if this shot was the shot that would result in a goal. You could feel the anticipation of the crowd on all sides of your body as a series of sensations.

When I arrived at this match, coming straight from a day of working in an office, my head busy with office thoughts and concerns that were distinctly my own, I was not, and could not imagine becoming, ‘one’ with any crowd. It was windy and cold and that biting easterly weather was felt by me personally—in my bones. I was, in what I was sensing and thinking, completely intact as an individual. And it was me, an individual, who was then crushed on all sides by strangers, noticing their features, their peculiarities, their smells—except that, once the match began, something changed.

As the match progressed, I found that I was developing a craving for a goal. As its promises and failures continued to be expressed through the bodies of the people pressed against me, I had a feeling akin to an appetite, increasingly more intense, of anticipation, waiting for, hoping for, wanting one of those shots to get past the Millwall goalkeeper. The business of watching the match had started to exclude other thoughts. It was involving so many aspects of my person—what I saw, smelled, said, sang, moaned, what I was feeling up and down my body—that I was becoming a different person from the one who had entered the ground: I was ceasing to be me. There wasn’t one moment when I stopped noticing myself; there was only a realization that for a period of time I hadn’t been. The match had succeeded in dominating my senses and had raised me, who had never given a serious thought to the fate of Cambridge United, to a state of very heightened feeling.

And then the game—having succeeded in apprehending me so—played with me as it played with everyone else. It teased and manipulated and encouraged and frustrated. It had engendered this heightened feeling and, equally, the expectation that it would be satisfied: that there would be gratification—or not. That the team would score—or be scored against. That there would be victory—or defeat. Climax—or disappointment. Release. But what happens when all that energy, concentrated so deep into the heart of the heart of the crowd, is not let go?

Not scoring is a feature of the game itself. Neither winning nor losing is another. Four matches were played on the preceding Sunday. In the match between Norwich City and Liverpool, the result was a goal-less draw. Between Bristol City and Bolton Wanderers, it was a one-one draw. Manchester United scored one goal and beat Hereford United one-nil. Everton beat Sheffield Wednesday by an own goal—victory was a mistake. The day before there had been eight games in which no goal was scored. There had been ten matches in which the final result was a draw. The preceding weekend there had been twelve.

People attend football matches in the belief that they, like the spectator of any other sport, will see either victory or defeat; they accept it as their condition that they will see neither. They accept that they will not witness a goal being scored. A goal is an unnatural event. There are so many obstacles: the offside rule, the congestion in the penalty box, the narrowness of the goal itself, the training of the keeper and his defenders. But then, such is the game and its merciless punishment of its spectators, that even when the unnatural occurs and a goal is scored, they can never be sure that they have seen it. It is one of the fallacies of the game that there is no thrill greater than watching the scoring of a goal; it is one of the facts that most people miss it. The goal itself is a see-through box of threads, and unless you are looking upon it from up high or into it from straight on or viewing it with the benefit of television cameras, you cannot tell when the ball has actually gone through and scored—until it has hit the back of the net. In every goal except the penalty kick, there is a small period of perception when there is neither goal nor no goal: dead time. Dead time is not a long time in clock-time—there is the moment when the ball appears to be about to cross the line, and, later, there is the moment when it definitively hits or fails to hit the back of the net—but in any kind of emotional chronology it can seem endless. Here in Cambridge, watched on all sides by supporters desperate to see a goal, wanting to beat this magical goalkeeper and the mysterious gravitational field he had established around himself, five shots were on target. Five shots that—especially from our exaggerated position, at midfield, level with the players—were visually indistinguishable from shots that had crossed the line. And again, each time, the sheer physical sensation: I could feel everyone round me tightening up, like a spring, triggered for release. Except that there was no release. There was no goal. The ball did not hit the back of the net: the shots had gone wide.

Some time ago, I attended a Scottish Cup Final at Hampden Park between the two Glasgow teams, Celtic and Rangers. There were sixty-six thousand supporters, one half in blue, uncompromisingly Protestant, and the other half in green, uncompromisingly Catholic. I stood on the Celtic side. The terraces were enclosed by chain-link fences, topped by four rows of barbed wire curving back in the direction of the spectators. The message was clear: the herd would not be going over the top. At the bottom of each aisle was a gate that led on to the pitch. The gate was locked shut. Behind each gate stood three policemen, their backs to the pitch: throughout the game they watched only the crowd. Only the supervisor had the key, and he had to be called over when a gate needed to be opened. The gates would have to be opened twice.

It was early days—I had not been to many matches—and I had no way of measuring what I was seeing. I knew that this spectacle—the stadium full of sectarian intensity, sixty-six thousand supporters, half in blue, half in green—was unlike any sporting event I had ever attended. With hindsight, I can see that I did not appreciate the weight, the gravitas, of the occasion: Rangers and Celtic; Protestant and Catholic; the Cup Final. And Celtic losing two-nil.

The Celtic goal, when it came, came quickly—there was an opportunity; it was taken—but it was difficult to say what had occurred. It had happened with such speed that no one knew who had made the shot or, even, at first, that a shot had been made. There was silence—stunned, incredulous silence. Dead time, frozen time, no time, neither goal nor no goal. No one could register the fact of it, as if sixty-six thousand people were playing the moment over again in their minds, checking their perceptions: was that a goal? is there a penalty? is the flag up? is the ball in the net? Proof: the ball is in the net. Check again: yes, it is there. The ball is in the net. The unnatural deed is done. The goal is a fact.

And then, after the silence, the explosion. There was room and space around me, and the crowd, erupting, swelling, rose inches into the air. A stranger, who moments before had looked menacing and aggressive, grabbed both my hands. Another one embraced me. I turned and was kissed on the cheek. I was embraced again. Everybody was in motion, when suddenly the movement was more than what I understood and I was tumbling forward, everyone was tumbling forward, falling down the steps of the terrace. I rolled down several steps—five, six—and when I looked up there was no one standing. Everyone had fallen and yet the celebrations continued. People got up on to their knees and were shouting. Still jubilant, there were others, rolling around, kicking their feet in the air, screaming with bliss, as though in a fit.

It was the second time that the police had to unlock the gates. Once again, there were injuries, so many that there were not enough stretchers. Several people were taken off on folding metal chairs—the back of the chair held by one policeman, the legs by another, the injured supporter flopped over it, head dangling dangerously. Others were placed on the advertising placards that encircle the pitch. One casualty disappeared atop a promotion for Marlboro Lights.

Mounted constables arrived, and in the mêlée that followed more than 50 persons were injured. When the barricading was broken down, the rioters piled the debris, poured whisky over it and set the wood ablaze. The flames spread to the pay-boxes, which were only 20 yards from a large tenement of dwellings. Great alarm prevailed, particularly when the firemen were attacked by the mob, and prevented from extinguishing the fire, for no sooner had they run out the hose than the crowd jumped on it, and, cutting it with knives and stones, rendered the efforts of the firemen useless.

There are two points about this act of violence that are of interest: first, it is the first recorded incident of serious crowd trouble in the history of football. It took place in April 1909. Previous incidents had been mainly small acts of vandalism directed at officials for cancelling a match, or attacks on referees for making bad decisions. This was the first crowd riot: the Scottish football league was twenty years old.

Everyone except the members of Cambridge United team itself. They were playing as if they believed they could win; they appeared not to have realized that they did not have the stamina to carry on, that their style—consisting of long passes, pitch-length sprints and maximum exertion—was a particularly exhausting one. After one period of extra time and no substitutions, it would have been reasonable to have played defensively, to have accepted a draw. Instead the Cambridge United players appeared more determined: more long balls, more pitch-length sprints, more brutal exertion. They had drawn upon some inexplicable reserve of adrenalin, and mid-way through the final period of extra time, United looked like it might score.

In the last minutes, the Millwall keeper started stalling for time. Even he had accepted the draw, not wanting to ruin the chance now, with so little time remaining, of a replay. He dribbled the ball round the penalty box, ventured to its outer edge, returned, and then out to the edge again, where he passed the ball on, turned and returned to his goal. He did not realize that the ball was about to be passed straight back to him.

I made my way back to my car. It was illegally parked outside a petrol station on the Newmarket Road, and when I got to it I discovered that, by a surprising coincidence, the car parked next to mine, also illegally, belonged to the very man who had been standing next to me in the ground—the one with the wrinkled face and the strong smell of American cigarettes. We acknowledged each other in a friendly sort of way, but one involving the smallest possible physical gesture. I think I raised an eyebrow, my left one, slightly. I think he might have lowered his chin, just. And that was right: a conversation now—even a simple greeting—would have been hugely out of place.