Love & Hate

Good article about sporting rivalries

Thin line between love and hate betrays united front By Simon Barnes, Sports Writer of the Year

All the Catholics Hate the Protestants And the Protestants Hate the Catholics All the Muslims hate all the Hindus And everybody hates the Jews. National Brotherhood Week, Tom Lehrer

ALAN SMITH has left Leeds United to join Manchester United. This, apparently, is shocking. Disloyal, treacherous, Judas Iscariot reincarnate before our eyes. Why should this be? He has left Boots to join Woolworths. What’s the big deal? It is a big deal because Leeds United “hate” Manchester United.

Refer to Manchester United in a newspaper as “United” and you will get angry letters from Leeds fans saying that they are United, too, and it is cruel and demeaning to refer to another club as “United”.

In truth, the only thing that has united Leeds all season has been their disapproval of Smith’s move to United. Sorry, I mean Manchester United — no connection with the firm the other side of the Pennines. The message is that if Smith really loved Leeds as much as he said he did — boyhood supporter, serial badge-slobberer — he would have died rather than go to United. Not this one, that one.

I remember watching a supporter carried, literally kicking and screaming out of a football ground, caught up in a frenzy of hatred. The match? Watford versus Luton Town.

Suppose you were abducted by aliens and dumped in the streets of an unfamiliar London satellite town. Would you be able to tell the difference between Watford and Luton? Is there a significant difference in quality between the Watford Boots and the Luton Boots, the Watford Woolworths and the Luton Woolworths? It’s like a blind taste test of Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola: can’t tell the difference and, anyway, I’d much rather have something else.

All of which prompts this question: why is it necessary to prove your love of one thing by hating another? It takes me back to the sixth form. Art was good, therefore science was bad — an attitude I now hold in contempt. James Joyce was good, therefore D. H. Lawrence was bad. How Ralph and I argued that one.

It seems that there is a human need for polarities, a human urge to define ourselves not just by what we love, but by what we hate. If we love something, we must hate its antithesis. A group of loud young men will all be proud of their heterosexual natures. Therefore, they “hate” homosexuals.

Sport is an endless belt of rivalries and hatreds. Round here, where I live, you are supposed to love Ipswich Town and hate Norwich City. The man from Mars who traditionally settles sixth-form arguments would find it hard to spot the subtle differences between Suffolk and Norfolk. They find it hard enough in Essex and Cambridgeshire.

Sport is a conduit for hatreds that run deep and bitter. The rivalry between Celtic and Rangers is about Catholic and Protestant — Irish immigrant blood or “pure” Scottish blood. Fixtures between the Glasgow clubs are regarded as a traditional aspect of British life. Four times a year at least, a city celebrates its loathing. In order to love and be one kind of Celt, you must loathe another kind of Celt; in order to love one understanding of God, you must loathe another. It is a very short journey from Ibrox to Jonathan Swift.

Gulliver explains to the Houyhnhnms the causes of war in human society: “Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue: whether it is better to kiss a post or throw it on the fire; what is the best colour for a coat, whether it be black, white, red or grey; and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more.”

And once we go from local to national rivalries, the witch’s brew really starts to boil and bubble. This island has two populations whose greatest joy in sport is the beating of a team representing England. You are not a proper Celt unless you want to see England beaten at sport by anybody, most particularly a team wearing a coat of your preferred colour.

I well remember being caught up in a human gridlock during Euro 96, compressed on all sides by a mash of people singing: “If you all hate the English, clap your hands.” I got out with no worse injury than sore palms. The significant part of this story is that England weren’t even playing.

And farther afield. England’s cricketing rivalry with Australia remains, but in terms of serious hatred, that has been taken over by Pakistan: insufficiently servile, constantly accused of being cheats — whether by means of umpires or ball-tamperers — and, worst of all, Muslims.

On the football field, England has highly charged rivalries with Germany and Argentina, both dangerous, both with their basis in warfare. There is another dangerous hatred, with Turkey (also unforgivably Islamic).

On then, to the festival of jingo known as the Olympic Games. The Soviet empire may be dead, but China will be doing everything in its considerable power to beat the United States at every turn, while every event that pits the US (and, alas, Britain) against an Islamic nation will be highly charged as never before.

It’s enough to make you declare with George Orwell that the only effect that sport can have on relations between two communities is to make them worse: sport is “war minus the shooting”, as he famously remarked.

But that’s not altogether right, is it? Me, I think the shift from machineguns to footballs is a good thing. And rivalries do seem to be a basic human need, albeit not the one that makes you most proud to be a human.

But these rivalries and hatreds bring a certain truth to bear: the strange discovery that you are more like your rival than you would have believed possible and that a continuing historical hatred is, at times, alarmingly close to love. Sport divides, but it cannot divide without inextricably linking. In sport, whether we like it or not, we are United.

Originally posted by Doctor Clayhead Al - were you the angry fella at the Luton vs. Watford clash?

Nah. Bar one minor disaster in October 97, when I was thankfully miles away in Tenerife, they've always been rather joyful occasions if you hail from my particular siding off the M1.