Running Past Solitude
A terrible prelude
It could have been Everton for me, too. I think about this while running in the park one autumn morning and the thought is a shock to my system. It’s unpleasant to admit because all of life would be different if I were an Everton fan rather than a Liverpool fan. Also, because I know it easily could have been the case, which makes my life – my love – seem random.
Another thing that’s hard to admit: in a way, my love is quite arbitrary. I have been a lifelong fan of Liverpool Football Club, a team from a city I first visited when I was in my thirties (I went to see a football game, yes), a place I have no straightforward link to. I have been a lifelong fan of Liverpool because when my family first got cable television and my dad and I started watching football together, Liverpool was the only team whose name I knew. So they became my team. This is not how it usually works. For many fans, football is tradition, something like a genetic trait. An inheritance. You’re born into a family that supports a team, or you’re from a place, you have a sense of ownership and an easy, legible sense of belonging. I don’t have that. Never did. My dad and I watched English football on television, from another country thousands of miles away, because that was the league the local sports channel was showing. Liverpool was a place I could only imagine from the shots before the game, showing the crowds walking along the local streets, headed to the stadium. And yet I feel a connection to this place. My love, my fandom, grew over the years and showed me how love is something that happens over time, something that materialises and entrenches itself into who you are. I am jealous of the people who have a legible connection to their football teams. Mine is not that. And I wonder, since it’s not historical, since it’s not rooted, if my love could be challenged, be vulnerable. Part of my response to the idea of Crossing the Park is that thinking about it risks undoing my love by suggesting a switch is possible. Not that I could do it (I am not an artist!) but since I have no history to ground me in Liverpool, my love feels fragile.
To love a football team – passionately, inexplicably, to feel and harbour and grow this love, often throughout one’s life – is not a natural state of affairs. Football is entertainment, a way to spend weekend afternoons, a kickabout in the park with mates, an afterschool activity. It’s all those things, but that’s not really what it is. Football, Liverpool’s current manager Jürgen Klopp has aptly said, is the most important of the non-important things. To a non-football-fan, all of the above would seem excessive. Love, life: this is not the stuff of a Saturday afternoon at the ballpark. To a non-sports-fan, the fact that supporters take their teams so seriously, even obsessively, may seem senseless, pointless. Why suffer?
I have an answer, and it has to do with that easy sense of belonging I describe above. That is, it’s ok when it’s not easy, too. I am a new kind of football fan: the result of the game moving – through television rights and financial opportunity – beyond its traditional place. It’s hard for me to explain to someone from Liverpool that I feel like we have everything in common. I have now spent much of my life explaining my love of (you could say choice of) a football club. How could I love something I have no tangible affinity to? The answer I give is love is a choice. It has to be. This is one of the reasons football is so important to me: it has taught me how love can be a form of insistence.
How to come together
Football is a communal experience, a coming together, a meeting. Singing with other people at the ground on a Saturday afternoon. Raising a glass with strangers at the pub during a midweek evening game. Spontaneous hugs when your team scores. Chatting with someone on the bus because one of you is checking the scores on a phone. Meeting someone new, making conversation, only to realise you support the same club and feel intimately connected. It’s one of the things I love most about football – the feeling that the love of football, which I grew up thinking of as private, something between me and my dad, can be so public. At the Belfast Marathon, I discovered that in running, too. The thumping, sweet bass sound of runners leaving the starting line in front of Stormont Estate. Their feet touching the ground, coming together, heading the same way.
I have a secret running practice. Many runners join running groups, talk about their runs, post about running on social media via apps like Strava. I don’t really do that. I don’t do that because I’m a very mediocre, probably bang-average runner. I don’t do that because my running playlist is full of embarrassing pop music. I don’t do that because, as Bella Mackie writes in her 2018 book Jog On: How Running Saved My Life, girls often internalise an idea that exercise is unfeminine, and I think I may have never grown out of this. Exercise just feels uncool, talking about it totally mortifying. Mackie’s book is decidedly not cool: she is incredibly earnest in her writing, describing her struggles with mental health and how running has helped her overcome them. Her book feels almost too personal to read. But this is how I and why I feel an intimate connection with her – not because we have something (running) in common, but because I, too, want to be personal. I want to be earnest and talk about experiences. It’s another thing I learned from football, from arguing for my love of it: that the things we love matter. That we should (or could) talk about them. That we will meet others in that love.
At some point while running the Belfast Marathon, I became incredibly emotional, was close to tears. I type an explanation of that sorrow, then delete it (it’s too personal). Then type again in a different version, delete again (perhaps for another essay). Suffice to say: loss. I felt it when I was running past Solitude Stadium, where Belfast team Cliftonville FC play, and the name of the ground – so evocative, so surprising – made me laugh a bit. I then turned a corner, and a view of a lake opened in front of me. It was all so beautiful. I felt overwhelmed. Hence the almost-tears. Belfast was new to me and running was an extraordinary way of seeing, of being in, a new place. And a new experience felt like something to be shared, but the loss got in the way.
I guess I had always wanted to write about running because even though I had kept it to myself, running has become meaningful and big to me. I wanted to read the books about running, like Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running from 2007, a journal of a year of running (I loved him describing how he used his imagination before running the New York City Marathon: ‘I see myself crossing several steel suspension bridges, and imagine the emotions I’ll have as I run along bustling Central Park south, close to the finish line’). Thomas Gardner logging 52 runs in one year in Poverty Creek Journal (2004), paying attention to the sun and the changing seasons, the feeling of the ground beneath his feet and the ideas and emotions he had daily. And Mackie: Mackie for whom running is so personal it’s become a huge part of her recovery from a divorce, her dealing with anxiety. Jog On suggests more than simply that a woman can be brave enough to disregard the pressure for women not to exercise: she writes about it, because she knows women’s experiences and lives are often ignored. She knows that writing about it is a form of meeting other people, and telling them, this is what it feels like. I wanted to write about running because so many of the books about running are personal, because so many of them are forms of journals. I am interested in how reflection on personal experiences is woven into our days.
I ran the Belfast Marathon (track back: I ran a short leg of the relay race of the Belfast Marathon) because Michael Hanna invited me, as a Liverpool fan, to join his relay team as part of Crossing the Park. It was another form of coming together. We took a team photo of our relay team with the four of us, just before the starting line, kitted out in Liverpool FC gear. We’re different kinds of fans (in fact, I never owned a Liverpool shirt, am just decked out in a scarf borrowed from Hanna’s haul of Liverpool merch he procured as part of the project) but from the photo we just look like fans. Like we belong together. A relay team racing towards a common goal is such a literal way of expressing a coming together. I guess that is part of the charm of being literal: it squashes nuance, questioning. We met and took a photograph and ran a race and we were a team. I didn’t question it for a second. I write above about how fandom is so often the result of a legible, clear-to-see link. A place, a heritage, a connection that doesn’t require examining. Crossing the Park does exactly that: it poses a question. A what-if. A lot of football fans (remember – the most important of the non-important things, a thing to take incredibly seriously) would be horrified at the suggestion that one could switch allegiances, start loving another team.
But then: people immigrate, switching countries. They fall out of love and in love again with someone else. They leave things behind. They start over. I’m consciously writing about it in emotional, almost sentimental terms. If I talk of fandom as a form of love, there’s an opportunity in it. The opportunity to explore or question that love. This is something Hanna’s project suggests.
Love is hard
Or: football is hard to love. The last World Cup was held in Qatar, disregarding the country’s sullied human rights records and the atrocious conditions in which many migrant labourers built the stadium. Qatar’s World Cup was a huge success in cementing the country’s image, influence, in looking away from these conditions I describe. Also, Manchester City is owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family and Newcastle by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, sportswashing enterprises that perhaps draw inspiration from London team Chelsea, which was for many years owned by a Russian oligarch who used the club to whitewash his image. Footballers fly in private jets to many of their games. The then head of the Spanish football federation forcibly kissed footballer Jenni Hermoso when Spain won the Women’s World Cup and many Spanish footballing officials did not cry out about this blatant, visible, act of diminishing a woman at the moment her career peaked. We know it all: we know that football, this game loved by a huge percentage of the world population, is also the ground where money, globalisation, soft power and expansion play out. Hard to love, I said.
Still, when I think about football, I think about love. Love: that emotion that swells across the stadium when fans raise scarves, flags and signs, when they sing. Writing this, I’m humming ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, the song by Gerry & The Pacemakers that has become synonymous with Anfield, the stadium where Liverpool play. But any fan would know this feeling. Manchester City supporters sing ‘Blue Moon’ because City wear a blue kit. At times they also come together around the Beatles song ‘Hey Jude’ because it came out in 1968, the last time City won the league title before the team saw enormous success and multiple titles once it was bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group, which poured money into the club, building new facilities, buying all the most expensive players in the world, paying the wages of the best managers, and consequently winning multiple trophies. Dortmund, in Germany, also sing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ (the legend is German fans started singing it back in the 1960s, thinking it was just a stadium song, not realizing how closely associated it is with Liverpool); when the two teams meet in European competitions, the two sets of fans sing in unison. When the crowd sings ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ they connect to each other, to the players, the television audiences, even the players of the other team, who know: this stands for something. That is, love.
The contradiction between the romance of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and the feeling that football is hard to love is where my fandom resides. I see it as a methodology, a way of looking at the world through the prism of football. A lifetime as a football fan has confronted me with questions about nationalism and immigration, gender, money, power and what it means to belong. It’s possible to be a football fan without engaging with all these large issues and how they intersect with the sport – it may be easier, too. But I am not that kind of fan. The more I think about fandom, the more I believe that it is not only this predetermined thing – an aspect of birth or family – rather, I see it as a way to recognise difference and think through it. I say that through football I’ve learned to think of love as a form of insistence. For that love to be challenged, the way Hanna’s project challenges the way many football fans think about their connection to their team, means we fans have to come up with a language for that unreasonable thing: a love of a football team. That language will, perhaps, include an awareness of all the things that make football so hard to love. And a warmth towards all the things that make that love possible, that make a whole world.
What would life be like if I were an Everton fan? I say above it would be different, but in a way, it wouldn’t. Instead of texting one friend who is also an obsessive Liverpool fan during games (our last exchange: ‘just saw the West Ham score: all is well in the best of all possible worlds’), I’d text the Everton-supporting friend with whom I currently have a casual, funny rivalry. In lieu of writing this essay from the point of meeting Hanna from the end of the park that is his new love, I would write about his back walking away from the love we would have shared. We’d still be running together.
Orit Gat is a writer and art critic living in London. She has written for multiple magazines and is currently writing a book about football, love and loss titled If Anything Happens.