Category Archives: AM

Glorious defeat

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16th May, 2010


A big and slightly scary man came and sat next to me at Wembley yesterday.  Nodded hello.   Sat quietly for a bit.  Then suddenly stood up, spread his arms and screamed “I DIE!”


It took me a moment to realise he was joining in with the song, arriving without warning at our section of the ground, which goes “Portsmouth till I die, Portsmouth till I die, I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m Portsmouth till I die.”



 

AM writing in The Times, 2003, sent by Jules Smith



In the post on the morning of the Cup Final, I found a clipping kindly sent to me by a fellow Pompey fan.  It was an article from 2003 by Anthony Minghella writing in The Times, about the joys and miseries (mostly miseries) of following Portsmouth, and his then obsession with the computer game Championship Manager.  Even in the fantasy version, the problem was that the cast-offs off one of the rich clubs would cost more than (and beat) a Pompey 1st XI.


The economics of the game, aside from being unsustainable – I guess you didn’t need to be brain of Britain to see that coming, even in 2003 – were spoiling the fun of the game by preventing a level playing field.


So yesterday, we were playing a Chelsea XI picked from a squad worth around £300m.  Ours, to be sold in an emergency fire sale, I guess starting tomorrow morning, might yield £35m.


Looked at that way, our 1-0 defeat was nothing less than a miraculous victory.


I felt a little blue on the way home.  You always hope, especially in the FA Cup, that you can pull off a cheeky win.  That’s the romance of the Cup.  But actually what I noticed was that I was feeling better than I felt on the return journey after our FA Cup victory in 2008.


I thought at the time that it felt hollow because Anthony should have been there to share it with us.  His last message in my inbox says, “I hope there’ll be a few games for me soon”.   We had never experienced anything like an FA Cup Final for Portsmouth, and life is indeed cruel that it did not afford him that opportunity.


Another reason for the muted joy was that we did not convincingly thrash Cardiff City.  The game seemed slow and unexciting, perhaps a function of the size of the stadium and the distance from the action.  We Pompey fans are used to the bearpit that is Fratton Park.


But I don’t know.  Was it really the absence of Ant?  Or the less-than-thrilling football?  Or was it the fact that Pompey won the FA Cup, when we never win anything?


I suspect it was the latter.  Anyone who by accident of birth finds themselves singing the Pompey chimes will know that the tune, and the loyalty, stays with you.  Pompey fans do not grow up and become Chelsea fans or Man U or Liverpool.  Pompey fans are Pompey till they die.


That’s all well and dandy, but Pompey never win.  Sure we have the occasional run, but basically we’re crap.  The lot of the Pompey fan is to arrive full of hope, sing his heart out, terrify the visiting team with the best and most vocal support in the land – and then to depart crestfallen. 


My experience of following Pompey is mostly about the long, dejected journey home.  After years of that sensation, it comes to be the desired outcome.  Pompey fans have a perverse but Pavlovian response to loss, which is to pick themselves up and come back for more.  I noticed two banners among the crowd: one, optimistically, called for “Pompey in Europe”.  The other, a more accurate reflection of the Pompey character, declared, “You will never break our spirit.”


So, travelling home after the match, contemplating my own private woes, and the very public woes of Pompey – Cup defeat; relegation; unimaginable debt; the forthcoming firesale of the squad; a bleak, impossible future – I found myself oddly comforted by the familiarity of it all.   We are losers.  We are stoics.  We are loyal.  We are Pompey till we die.   


If there has been a quintessentially ‘Pompey’ moment in PFC’s recent history, this was it.  And so, more than after the 2008 victory, I wished Ant had been there with me, analysing, bemoaning, sharing and – finally – savouring defeat.





Notes to AM – Resignation

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12th May, 2010


Labour’s Love Lost


I would not trivialise your demise dear bro

with half-baked bons mots about that day or this

but I will say


What stunned me

– in the back of the car

crossing town for that brutal farewell –

what slapped me in the face

(and does today)

was the way

the world despite calamity carries on

oblivious.


There was your name

in bold blunt prison

behind Ham & High wire mesh


searing


and yet

the impudent business of living

– bastards standing at bus-stops –

went ridiculously on

as if any meaningful bus could ever –


a girl on her mobile

laughing

laughing?

another, taking leave, hand on hip, of a guy,

skirt stretched, one heel braking her wheeled suitcase

going somewhere


as if going somewhere

still meant anything

when we now know it’s just

going ridiculously on.


And later, when Downing Street called

it’s not that I wasn’t grateful

it’s that it was too late for prime ministerial tea

and sympathy to sugar the shock of earth’s outrageous turning

(he’s gone, by the way, I meant to say, your decent friend,

just yesterday, with two bonny lads and some dignity).


Of the numbing fractured kaleidoscope of that day’s images

one alone spoke sense:

Closing Down Sale

acknowledging as it did

resignation

acknowledging as we must

passing

heydays’ ebb and heydays’ flow

and look, here’s one again, on Oxford Street,

Everything Must Go.









Notes to AM – movie moments.

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26 April, 2010


Dear Ant,


Awarded the prizes in your name at the Hull Glimmer Short Film Festival this weekend.


The Anthony Minghella International Short Film Prize went to a mad, brilliant piece by Ramin Bahrani called Plastic Bag.  The film is narrated with great and understated wit by Werner Herzog.  It’s about the tragic emotions of a plastic bag who, having been used and discarded, is blown in the wind, searching as he goes for his ‘maker’ and for the meaning of life.  The ‘movie moment’ for me comes when he meets a red bag, the breeze takes them and they dance together like kites in the sky.  Isn’t she beautiful? he asks, excitedly, hilariously.


It’s a cruelly short-lived love story, alas.


AM writing in Hull, 1970s

Last time I was in Hull, October half-term in 1978 or so, you met me at the station.  I’d come up on my own from the Island, and managed the transfer between Waterloo and Kings Cross and was feeling pretty pleased with my twelve year-old self.  Different times.  You hugged me and asked me if Mum had given me any money for my keep.  Knowing full-well she’d given me a fiver.


So this weekend, I was braced for the emotion of recollection and loss.  I thought the station would be more or less the same and that I’d remember you standing there, waiting for me, my incredible brother.  Your smile, a blend of warmth and knowing.  Your gift for connection.  Your ability to see into souls.


But the station wasn’t the same.  Nothing to remind me of the visits of my boyhood.  Not even a whiff of recollection.  There’s a steel-and-glass shopping centre right next to the station, with a Tesco extra if you please.  And the air is different.  On Princes Quay, an alfresco cafe serves coffee in a daft two-cup arrangement.  Hull has acquired fancy northern ways.


(True, I didn’t have time to do the other stuff, the stuff that would surely have conjured you up and conjured up the tears.   I didn’t see Norman Staveley – your accountant and friend.  I didn’t visit your colleague Tony Meech in the University drama department – the place where you metamorphosed from quasi-delinquent schoolboy into the artist as a young man.  The place where you went in a slug, but emerged a butterfly.  There’s a studio there now with your name on it.  I didn’t go to your old house at 168 Park Avenue, where there’s a blue plaque and even a tree sculpture in your honour.)


So my bracing was unnecessary.  I didn’t bump into you on a single street corner.  There was no pain of vivid memory.  None of those sudden slap-in-the-face flashbacks which characterise grief.


The opposite, I’m afraid.


The truth is that Hull has moved on.  You’re just an echo now.   At the awards ceremony, the young film-makers who listened to my thumbnail sketch of your time at Hull weren’t – I think I’m right in saying – hugely interested.  They have their own careers to think of, and – except as a name on a prize – you can’t help them anymore.  Don’t be offended.  It’s just the order of things.  Larkin too, I noticed, is reduced to a logo these days: inch thick specs.  


The power and pulse of your charm and talent  – it used to electrify rooms.   There were fights, almost, to be near you.   Now all of that seems so ephemeral.


A brief dance in the wind.  A love story, cruelly short-lived.