About A Week: Blue And White
People are crying in Leeds today - and all because of a football team. But as a fan of Huddersfield Town, Peter Hinchliffe still has reason to hope.
They’re crying in Leeds today. Thousands of football fans have been cast into the deepest dungeons of Gloom Hall.
Leeds United - once among the greatest football teams in England - have been relegated from the Premiership League.
Instead of playing Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea this coming season they will meet such unfashionable opposition as Wigan, Stoke and Preston.
That is, if Leeds United still exists. The Club is as much as £70 million in debt. If normal business rules prevailed, they would be wound up.
But football - in Britain and throughout the world - is not a “normal’’ business. It feeds on local tribalism and pride to create a fantasy world of hopes and dreams.
“Next year we’ll win the Cup, then we’ll win the League, then we’ll be Kings of Europe…’’
In England today you are far more likely to see the colours of the local football team than you are the national flag.
So here am I, pontificating about the pseudo-religion that dominates the lives of millions of my fellow citizens, immune to the snake-oil charms of football.
Not a bit of it!
I’m hooked. I’m a fan.
Come 4.50 pm next Saturday, I could be wearing the biggest grin in Yorkshire. My team, Huddersfield Town, are playing away at Cheltenham. If they win, they will be promoted from the Third to the Second Division.
I say “my’’ team because the Huddersfield Town football club has been entwined with my life for more than 60 years. My dad took me to my first Town match when I was seven years old. I watched the game from a perch on his shoulders - the best seat in the ground.
Dad was a Huddersfield Town fan in their 1920s glory days when they became the first team to win the old English First Division three years in a row.
You don’t choose which football team to follow. It chooses you.
I went to Town matches with my father when I was a boy, elbowing my way into a crowd of 30,000 or 40,000.
In my twenties, as a journalist working for the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, I regularly reported on Town Reserves games, and occasionally covered a first team game.
When I worked as a reporter in the United States, then Kenya, the important task on a Saturday was to find out whether Town had won, drawn or lost.
I’m not the sort of fan who parades in a blue-and-white striped Town shirt. As a journalist, I wore sports jacket and grey slacks - neutral colours. There are few more ridiculous sights than pot-bellied gents, who would probably slip a disc if they tried to kick a ball, wearing the shirt of their local football club.
Nevertheless, I glowed with pride when I wandered into a sports shop in the Siam shopping centre in central Bangkok, Thailand, a couple of years ago.
On a rack were football shirts of famous clubs. Manchester United, Arsenal, AC Milan, Real Madrid…
And the blue-and-white of Huddersfield Town!
There was an explanation. Huddersfield were the first professional English club to sign on a Thai player.
But to see the blue-and-white symbol of Huddersfield displayed in Bangkok… Thrilling!
So for me and thousands of other Town fans, it’s fingers-crossed until this coming Saturday at 4.50 pm.
Cheltenham 0 Huddersfield Town 1.
That would do very nicely. Then on from the Second Division to the First, then the Premiership…
Why not?
One of Huddersfield Town’s most loyal fans is the actor Patrick Stewart, famous throughout the world as Captain Picard, commander of the starship Enterprise in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. He grew up in Mirfield, just three miles from Town’s old Leeds Road ground.
Perhaps Patrick could give some special help to the club. We need a sci-fi miracle if we are to be teleported to the higher realms of the Premiership.
But we can continue to dream.
And tearful Leeds United?
They’ll be back. There’s always some millionaire dreamer waiting to subsidise a big-city football club.
