It is a strange sort of cruel irony to be visiting various sports venues on this tour of my mind, when in the country of Outside, no sports are going on. As we leave the bus station at Plovdiv and get on a bus to Bayview Stadium, it is worth noting the kind of bus that we are on.
Ideally we'd like to travel by AEC Routemaster where the conductor would yell "Hold on; very tight, please!" before giving two pulls on a bell but sadly this is just a Volvo B10M derivative bus; where the smells of a decade's worth of boys returning from school sports, revellers returning from late nights, and the bus itself returning a dozen times a day from the suburbs, are all mixed together. It is an olfactory cocktail of body odour, vomit, grease, and the ever lingering smell of diesel which is mixed into a putrid concoction. Yet this is the smell of humanity heaving; now exeunt.
We head down the motorway passing signs for towns which have names which presumably mean something to someone but to an English speaker mean that no matter how you pronounce it, you are bound to be wrong. Names like Attaburra, Perrongbong, Jerrinweel, and Nong Nong. Re that last name: whenever you see a doubled name like that on the east coast of Australia, it usually means that there are a lot of that thing around. I have no idea what or if the word 'nong' means anything in an Aboriginal language but in English it means a stupid person and we sure have lots of those.
I digress.
We leave the motorway and head into that nondescript gum foresty thing which covers most of this land. Then after twisting and turning and after the smells of burning brakes join in the symphony of smells, we finally see the city of Bayview and the Bayview Stadium therein. Its four light towers are beacons into a hazy rainy night.
Tonight we have tickets to see the giants of Bayview City and the titans of Greenock United playing in a match which makes both of them seem normal sized.
Football is best viewed from the end of the stadium. This is the time of the week when insurance brokers, greengrocers, brick layers, lawyers and plumbers, who at least pretend to be mild mannered during the week, rain down symbolic abuse upon 11 players who are clad in a different coloured shirt. This is tribal, this is catarthic, this is gloriously pointless. For 90 minutes, whatever is going on in the rest of the world matters not an iota; which is precisely why it matters more than life and death. It is still of zero actual consequence.
The people up the other end of the stadium who are dressed in the all green of Greenock United are really exactly the same as us. For these 90 minutes though, we to they and they to us, are scum. There will have been old scores such as 2-1, 1-0, and 3-3, and new scores to settle, but ultimately they need us to exist as much as we do they. If the world is built on stories, then this is a story which writes into the traditions of itself, replacing heroes and villans as time passes, and where the old songs of the past get repurposed and join the song sheet of the present. I do not know how many people have teared up at the sounds of 70,000 people singing a song which comes from a musical, at a point in time when it is being sung to someone whose husband has just committed suicide but that's exactly where "You'll Never Walk Alone" comes from: the musical 'Carousel'.
We watch as Fred Dickerson squanders a shot from bang in front and we sigh in relief as McIver's shot is parried away by the fingertips of the goalkeeper in front of us. This is one of the great things about football. It can be played by people of vastly different sizes and because it is a team sport, one player's inadequacies can be carried by the rest of the team. Even the worst player in the world, can still act as a pivot point because ultimately football is a numbers and territory game.
The second hand is as dreary as the first and gradually we realise that as the conditions get wetter and the rain which is now visible against the light towers, is making ball control difficult and accurate passing impossible.
The breakthrough for them happens in the 87th minute when John Quinn lofts a ball to the head of Andriyv Poborski and our back four is left flat footed and stranded. Our goalkeeper Ron Harmony can not hold the ball and it passes through his hands like a piece of soap.
Greenock United 1 - Bayview City 0
87' Poborski.
At the other end of the stadium, they will probably file off towards pubs witho quaint names such as The Kebab And Calculator, The Bucket Of Blood, the Imperial Hotel, and the Commercial Hotel. Most of our fans can only look forward to trudging off to the bus to go home through the dreary night but we have to suffer the indignancy of staying at the Travelodge.
After you have been in enough Travelodges, you begin to lose all sense of place (even in imaginary Travelodges). There is always one fridge, one table, one television and remote and no proper tv reception, a bed and a couple of bedside tables. You could always go to a bottle shop and pay the same amount for a full size bottle of Old Tennessee Gut Rot or Chateaux de Box as you would for a miniature from the minibar but what would be the point?
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