| Once, the date would have passed unmarked on the Vallely family calendar. No longer: thanks to my eight-year-old, we have become a Manchester United household. Initially, I accompanied him to Old Trafford so that I could enunciate loudly in his ear my bowdlerised versions of the thersitical chants of the fans in the Stretford End.
(Fortunately, enunciation is not one of their strong points, and so my alternative versions of their cruder anthems seem to be stemming the tide, for the time being at any rate: “That boy Ronaldo makes England look slight.”) But I have now become focused on the substance, to the extent that the European Champions League final later this month has become a red-letter day in our diary.
Blind faith, I have discovered, is something far more suited to football than to religion. “We are all Protestants now,” the historian Adrian Hastings once ventured of his Roman Catholic confrères in the post-Vatican-II era. But doubt and questioning are not part of the football fanatic’s lexicon. Consider a penalty decision through the lens of club loyalty, and you will learn something about the borderline between truth and perception of which issues of heresy are a mere pale foreshadowing.
It was chastening therefore to read the letter that Avram Grant, the manager of Chelsea, our opponents at the final, wrote to the newspaper Ma’ariv in Israel, after his team reached the final. He compared the experience of three young teenagers: his son, and himself and his father at a similar age.
His 14-year-old son, Daniel, had just watched his father lead Chelsea to victory over Liverpool in the semi-final, which he described as the most important game of the season. Mr Grant contrasted that with an experience of his own, aged 14, when he had been sitting one night talking football with some friends on the porch of his parents’ house in Petach Tikva in Israel. They suddenly heard a noise that chilled the blood.
“It was my father, Meir, screaming out in the most terrible anguish in his sleep,” he wrote. That day, his mother told him why. His father was haunted still by the horrors he had faced at a similar age in Eastern Europe as a result of the Holocaust. Meir had watched his parents and five siblings die of starvation, and had buried them himself, in the snow with his bare hands.
“When I think today about those three generations,” wrote Mr Grant, “Daniel, Avram, and Meir — three children at the age of 14, one in the VIP box in London, me on the balcony in Petach Tikva, and my father surviving the flames of Europe, I put matters into proportion.”
The day after Chelsea’s semi-final victory was Holocaust Day. To mark it, Avram Grant left Stamford Bridge immediately after the game, and set off for Auschwitz, where, the next day, he took part in the March of the Living, a silent walk from the infamous concentration camp to the neighbouring death camp, Birkenau.
“In the end,” he wrote, “you remember and you understand and you know that nothing resembles what my father had to go through 65 years ago, and you get things back into proportion and distinguish between bad and good and know where you came from and where you are going back to.”
Football is not a matter of life and death: it’s far more important than that, one of the game’s most celebrated managers, Bill Shankly, once famously remarked. It was a good joke, but whoever wins the Premiership this Sunday, and the European trophy later in the month, Chelsea’s manager has done all football fans a service in reminding us that where we come from, and where we are going back to, is somewhere that can never be bounded by four corner flags — or by any other human construct.
Paul Vallely is associate editor of The Independent. |
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