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Here is another page in the scrapbook started recently. This one is rougher than the previous pages because it raises the following question : What can we learn from things which trouble us, such as other people’s violent acts? In this case, it’s about the sporting spirit in rivalry concerning a football club’s territory beyond the ground where a match is played.

On returning to a place I last was long ago, I tend to notice things which would escape ordinary attention, such as the fight I saw between rival football supporters on a station platform in Greenwich, London. I was passing through, of course, having left England decades before. Without having chosen to be there, a small crowd of us found ourselves witnesses to the incident. The issue at stake seemed to be one of territory, even though the match was over and people were going home. Where was the sporting spirit in all this?

George Orwell – Journalists’ Union Photo – Wikipedia

In his commentary on the tour by the Soviet football team Dynamo Moscow1 as Europe was crawling from the wreckage of World War II, George Orwell likens sport to war : Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.2

But what had I seen exactly in the battle on the station platform? An incident from a war? I wondered. There had been confrontation of a few minutes at most between rivals involving physical aggression but with no visible injuries to any of those involved. Later, I jotted down what I could remember. Simple, clear sentences. Or, at least, as clear as I could make them. Trying to keep as close as I could to the facts when writing them up. Yet again, as I reworked these, a poem was the form which reproduced best the tension and uneasiness of the circumstances.

It has stayed with me and, in these war-driven times, has come back to haunt me. Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday in the UK, which now honours the dead in all wars. But as the following text suggests, what is honourable can also have nothing to do with fair play.

Was the group fighting or fooling?
Hard to decide until the lock
Around the head squeezed tight and held.

Two lads, one black, one white, at it
On the station, while others watched.
But the black kid found himself apart.

Losing his cap, he crossed the tracks,
Protected by some unseen force,
A swimmer between two platforms.

And then, later, the kick of a ticket
Left on the table by tea drinkers
Back from Millwall3 over the river.

Attack still the best form of defence
For their rough reputation, once again.
But that lad? Not lured into their den4.

Fight Club on North Greenwich Station

  1. A BBC report from 2020 looks back on the Moscow Dynamo tour. ↩︎
  2. The Sporting Spirit, Tribune, 14 December 1945 ↩︎
  3. Founded in 1885, Millwall FC competes in the English Football League Championship. ↩︎
  4. Millwall’s nickname is The Lions and their stadium is known as The Den. The Wikipedia page on the football hooligans known as the Millwall Bushwackers explains where the club’s rough reputation comes from. ↩︎

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