I write about football, I read about football, and I genuinely care about football. I couldn’t care less about the monied end of the game, and I cannot abide the divisive, almost encouraged sectarianism that two teams from Glasgow cause in our Scottish society. In this day and age such entrenched attitudes are dreadful, and yet neither club does anything about it, because they thrive on the rivalry, fanned by the religious bile.
Anyway, that is not the main topic of this short piece. A recently ordered book The Roaring Red Front in the centre of the photo above has got my hackles up, and I walked into the mire, sadly hook, line and sinker. This serves me right for buying online and not first thumbing through it, or reading about the author, or in this case authors. The book was already on sticky ground given it was predominantly written by a Celtic supporting Irishman who has occasionally written for the Morning Star. Yet, ironically and hilariously, having allegedly put it out for a people’s vote on which Italian club to include, a fabulous recent book Ultras about Cosenza was still in the mind of the voters, and Livorno was initially discarded as being too left wing, almost Maoist?! It later transpired they didn’t visit the famous red town of Tuscany because the club was in meltdown and about to lose its stadium. The club did go bust, but they immediately rolled up their sleeves in the Toscana Eccellenza (5th tier), but didn’t stop playing at the wonderful Armando Picci stadium. Merely the numbers turning up just dropped due to the inferior opposition. This is what we call lazy journalism, no spine and no wish to visit lower league Italian football to stand on the curva with a diminished number of traditionally left wing fans.
Political splits are genuine in Italy, and I understand it more there as they had to fight fascism, and also have a strong communist leaning. I love Italian football, but as I have written in Football Weekends, I like the clubs I like and don’t subscribe to any political narrative. That said, in the photo above the Lazio shirt was bought for its fabulously unusual style, and won’t ever be worn. I detest Lazio more than any other club in Italy, but I still found it in my “neutral” affection for football kits to buy it. Cosenza in the Roaring Red Front doesn’t come across as being overly left, but like a lot of this book, it is rushed, and based purely in very few conversations with a mere handful of folk or one person in some cases. Tobias Jones’s brilliant Ultras book thrashed the Cosenza story to within an inch of its life, and it should have been acknowledged a couple of days hanging around the southern Italian city was going to fail to get the right sense, or should that be the left sense! Ternana managed to avoid detection altogether, a proper left club that hasn’t obviously reached the radar of a Celtic fan, phew!
I have alluded in articles written previously that politics have no place in football, and clubs hijacked by individuals to promote a certain way is dreadful. This book however swans around interviewing people and putting them in the left corner of politics even if on occasion, as at Dulwich Hamlet, the club chairman doesn’t want his club associated with either wing. However, because the disaffected fans of bigger clubs, being priced out or disillusioned with the product etc, they are immediately tagged with being left wing?!
The book troops out to South America, and of course, Celtic being “allegedly” pro Palestinian (aside from flying the flag, what do they actually do?), they head for Palestino in Santiago, Chile. Here you’ll find the biggest Palestinian diaspora outside Palestine in the world, and Palestino represent that group on the fields of the Chilean futbol league, rather successfully too. However, despite having travelled thousands of miles, the club aren’t very keen to talk, and he doesn’t even get in to see a game because he doesn’t have the necessary Chilean vaccine certificates! Those that are interviewed, a bit like Dulwich, don’t fit the narrative, these guys are actually more right wing inclined. It blows the theory that all Palestinians are from the left, but the author refuses to believe what he has been listening to and leaves under the romantic notion that Palestino in Chile are a true brother of the left!
Crossing the Andes brings us to Boca Juniors, chosen as the team of the left from Argentina for no better reason than they must be because River Plate are more inclined to be supported by the rich. Evita was a queen to the poor, and the ticker tape entrance of the teams to this day is a celebration of how the lottery winner was chosen when the tickets were all thrown up. Peron was a right wing politician who somehow managed to reach across both spectrums, perhaps partly due to his wife, but to this day Peronism that still exists isn’t left wing politics in the way this Morning Star writer would have wished. Indeed, in discussions with a local journalist he is told he should try Independiente (or Rojo No Existe as we Racing fans would say!) as they are more left inclined, something I have doubts about that too. He ignores that advice and continues to shape a narrative to fit what he wants to say. He largely just wants Boca to be included so he can trot out a never before read notion of how the clubs colours were chosen! I was always been led to believe that the guys who started the club decided that the flag of the first boat that entered the Boca docks would be the colours, and it was a Swedish vessel. However, if you want an Irish spin on this tale, the club’s first manager was Irish from Tipperary, whose colours in Gaelic football just happened to be the same as Boca!
This is one of the little stories where the world isn’t just viewed through beautiful left wing specs, they also happen to be green and white tinted. Having a Professor write your foreward is all very fine, but of course he is one steeped in the fine traditions of Celtic, and his nauseating introductions sets us on our way to an imbalanced view of the world. One of the most dreadful lines, amongst many comes with the notion that visiting grounds and seeing St Pauli and Celtic shirts are badges of the left brotherhood!! In my world, a Rayo Vallecano or Livorno shirt would be a genuine left badge of honour, clubs who do not endeavour to cash in on being left inclined.
I have had the great pleasure of being able to write about and dismantle the sheer nonsense that surrounds St Pauli and their tribe. I had the misfortune of seeing one solitary St Pauli shirt at two games in the Netherlands recently (not the same bloke), and far from thinking this was a badge of honour, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to poke at the notion. The romantic bile attached to fans of this club, where they welcome all within reason, and stand for all, within reason, but if you step out of their narrative, well you must be a Nazi, a term used in the book to describe anyone of an HSV persuasion, a thunderously libelous suggestion I would venture. As I wrote in Football Weekends, a club so full of its own “bohemianism” they have club shops in various parts of New York, it is all very capitalist, but somehow they find ways of justification at every turn.
One of my St Pauli blokes in Maastricht only goes to watch “friends” of St Pauli, and that night he probably didn’t get in as he only wanted to be with “his people” from NAC Breda, a club missed off the Roaring Red bench, a small group of other “great” left clubs with such tenuous justification, it’s quite sad that a publisher even thought a lot of this book was worthy of publication. Having discussed this with my Dutch friend Joris, Breda is more a Conservative city in the Netherlands, and generally Dutch teams are not politically motivated.
This German lad from Koln goes to cheer Celtic when he can of course, and his admiration for the Green Brigade knows no bounds. This is endorsed by the authors of the book, naturally, but then again they are Celtic fans. Why shouldn’t fans show their colours and expressions on flags and banners, as the Celtic hardcore are fetted, whilst bemoaning a fine they got for being derogatory to Israeli visitors, and obviously written well ahead of the Queen’s passing and more embarrassing antics. Well I am no fan of Israeli football, or anything from that land, but it doesn’t make me a left wing political person. I would say I am more apolitical, well maybe not to that level of ambivalence, but more inclined to see what I perceive to be the best path, and not wishing to label it either way. All things in moderation are fine in my book.
Amongst the great (sic) things the Green Brigade do is charity for the poor, food banks etc, or so we are told. The inference is that charity can only be a left wing aspect of life and fails to acknowledge any good work other clubs do, like Big Hearts charity in Edinburgh, ran by a club who don’t get a mention as they’d be too “Rangers” orientated, therefore right wing in the mind of these writers, even though I am sure that is way off the mark. Of course they endeavour to stick their oar across the country by bigging up Hibernian, the first true Catholic club of Scotland. Is the inference also that only Catholicism has charity at its heart? After all, Rangers were apparently just an ordinary club who took up the Union Flag merely in counterpoint to the Irish Tricolour. This long held narrative that sectarianism is a one way street is the underlying theme trotted out here, and not for the first time. When it comes to it, religion doesn’t matter in Edinburgh, and if it wasn’t for the continual ongoing nonsense served up by the Old Firm, it would have been extricated from our society altogether by now, but a tiny minority here still find excuse to trot out songs and flags at the Edinburgh derbies, and I am convinced that is only because of the influence of seeing them get away with it in Glasgow.
Another Celtic fan wrote a book about Third Lanark, a Scottish club that disappeared due to bad management in the ‘60’s, just like our Roaring Red duo, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to get his dig in at modern day Rangers. In both these publications, I have to say it is worthy of scorn that the author’s bias is allowed to be published and spoil a book, especially in the case of the Third Lanark one, where it has nothing to do with the story. These aspects of anyone’s bias should not be allowed to find a voice in anything other than a publication from that club, if anywhere. I know I am not alone in being sick and tired of both Rangers and Celtic, and to be honest politics don’t enter into the differences, it’s merely the stupidity of a minority that look to grow such differences.
I have never felt a desire to slaughter a book before, and I could go on, but that’s enough, I am boring myself with this now!!
Football Adventures with James Rendall 