Just before sleeping I read that the attendance at the Oval last Saturday for our league game versus Lisburn Distillery was only 1,153. This would be a small crowd on any day, in any season of our history, but is especially remarkable because it was our first home game following the news that HM Revenue & Customs is readying to launch court proceedings to recover years of unpaid tax; court proceedings that will force the club into administration, cause panic grabbing from our other creditors (who to date have shown remarkable patience) and ensure the liquidation of our only real asset - the Oval Grounds. Following this news, broken with flourish by the BBC, a sense of urgency gripped Glentoran supporters and fan sites and forums were filled with rescue ideas. The club moved quickly to form Spirit of 41 – an umbrella brand for fundraising activities making an intelligent but high-stakes reference to the bombing of the Oval in the Belfast Blitz and marathon community effort to rebuild the ground and see the club return to Mersey Street in 1949. Supporters’ meetings took place, rallies organized, Facebook groups established, war cries screamed across the world wide web. I took some heart; from a distance it appeared like people cared. No substantial money raising ideas had emerged – the headline initiative being a small time raffle for a hairdresser’s car – but we weren’t short on passion from the keyboard army.
But the true test would be the size of attendance at the next home game. The best way fans can donate is not charitably, or in pity, but in return for Saturday afternoon entertainment. This is the proper relationship between fan and club. Collection buckets may be a short term necessity but do nothing for the club’s long term image. Going to the match, not ‘liking’ a Facebook group, is also the best way for fans to show their support, give heart to the team and demonstrate our collective power to media and creditors. And it didn’t happen. If anything the news, rather than boosting the crowd, detracted from it. Nobody other than our hardcore fan base wants to be associated with a club in its ugly death throes.
We’re doomed because the people of east Belfast and wider catchment area have given up on us. This is one tragic cock-up too many. A final example of our inability to function healthily in a modern world. Across the globe, and this is true also for the UK no matter how we try to pretend otherwise, only a very small minority of football fans are the most loyal of all sports fans. Most people fall in and out of love with both the game and their club many times in their life. They spend long periods with switched or more focused allegiances for other teams, always with valid excuses of geography or family. Their passion ebbs and flows with different life adventures. They go to the games because the team is winning and they’re with their mates; but fortunes change, friends move on, other hobbies take hold, people relocate. Despite the fireside tales of loyalty that are passed from football generation to generation, most people only want to be associated with success, they want to love a club that makes them proud; in fact, will only love a club if it makes them proud. If it doesn’t, or ceases to, they rarely make a public renunciation; they just stop going, stop caring, and start transferring their time and emotions to other things. We only have one life to live and being a martyr isn’t a fun way to do it. Except for the very few, Glentoran just doesn’t offer enough to people any longer to gain their attention, let alone loyalty or fanaticism. And certainly not their life savings. This is nothing new – it’s the end of a process, not the beginning, because our decline began 40 years ago. HMRC’s latest move hasn’t galvanised a community, merely embarrassed it.
As I sit and write on an autumn Vancouver Saturday morning, looking out over Burrard Inlet to Grouse and Seymour Mountains, rested after a short business visit to Toronto and anticipating another trip east across this huge continent on Monday, I wonder just why I care so much about a musty, dying old football club in the east end of Belfast. I struggle to link my own values with that of the club. It has no ambition, is addicted to being second best, has no inclination towards self-improvement, no work ethic, and wants to play no part, however small, in a networked European football community. In my own athletic life, for no more than solid amateur performances in a fringe sport, balanced with a busy career, I even train harder and lead a healthier lifestyle than many, if not all, of the club’s playing staff.
Further to that, I never quite fitted in to Irish League football. Despite strong and enduring links to the area, I’m not from east Belfast. I played rugby and went to Grammar school. For most of the many years that I lived locally, and therefore went regularly to games, I was either too young or too consumed with religious piety to drink mammoth quantities of alcohol.
And yet I do care. I cry for the club in my sleep. I’m obsessed with it. I love its colours, badge, ground and history. I revere Jim Cleary, Billy Caskey, Glen Little and Paul Leeman. I feel stabbed in the chest when we lose, even in the Co. Antrim Shield. And despite the glumness of what I’ve written above, deep down, I believe Glentoran to be the finest, most romantic, majestic and beautiful football club ever to exist. The thought of it no longer being (Glentoran F.C. 1882-2010) breaks my heart.
I rarely get to the games now. Being 4,392 miles from home makes that difficult. As many push as pull factors have caused me to move overseas, yet Glentoran is one cornerstone of my heritage, and my family legacy, from which I haven’t ran. It has stuck and will do for life, even if I outlive the club. I suppose there was something magical, or moulding, about the age and circumstances at which I started following the team. Many other interests from that era came and went – ornithology, rally cars, photography – but Glentoran remained.
Both my father and grandfather supported the Glens, although both only as big game attendees. They were there for the Terry Conroy cup final and the Benfica and Rangers games. I have to go back to my great-grandfather to find the last week-in, week-out fan. As often happened in the industrial era, he moved to Belfast from the countryside and adopted a local football team as way of identifying with his new city.
I went to primary school in Omagh where I saw my first live football game – Omagh Town versus RUC, Irish Cup, Omagh Showgrounds. I’d never seen the Glens but obviously spoke of my support for them because I still have the leaving present that my classmates gave me when I left at 11 to move to Newtownabbey – a Glentoran versus Juventus programme from 1977, the year I was born. As we settled in our new life just north of Belfast my older brother made friends at school with a Crusaders fan. Every Saturday this friend of my brother went to games and this seemed both glamorous and grown-up to us, thereby inspiring us to start going to the Oval. For four or five years we went regularly together. These were epic journeys. For the first few years we’d set out just after lunch to catch the bus from Jordanstown to Belfast city centre and then we’d walk to the Oval. As the crow flies, this was less than 15 miles from home, but at that age it felt like we were venturing to another, more interesting civilisation. These were good times with my brother. By this stage he was becoming too cool, and me too embarrassing, for him to speak to or even acknowledge me at school, but on a Saturday afternoon we became brothers, friends and fellow Glenmen. I can still feel the bulk of my hidden scarf inside my coat, under my armpit, as we made the double scurry past the entrance to Short Strand. Laterly, he passed his driving test and we’d drive into town. I’ll never, ever forget the September night we drove in together, parked on Templemore Avenue for fear of mass traffic nearer the ground, and went to see our wee team play Marseille, the finest side in Europe. My brother’s interest waned shortly after that. He continued going to Boxing Day games until the late nineties before stopping altogether. But I was hooked and pressed on. Often there was a friend to drag along with me – one or two of them becoming firm Glentoran supporters – and other times I went alone, which was equally pleasurable. In my mid to late teens I started going to more and more away games, catching Ulsterbuses to Seaview and Taylor’s Avenue and trains to Inver and Clandeboye Parks. By the time I passed my own test I was going to every single match, home and away, sometimes over 60 games a season. When I lived on the Lisburn Road during my time at Queen’s I’d set out before 6pm on a Tuesday evening to walk down through the Holy Lands, across Ormeau Embankment, down Ravenhill Road and Templemore Avenue, along Newtownards Road, then Dee Street, Mersey Street and Parkgate Drive for Gold Cup, Co. Antrim Shield or league games. A handful of times I even did that on a Friday night to see the Seconds. And I remember skipping tutorials only a couple of months before my final year exams to do the same walk to interview Roy Coyle for a fanzine I was thinking of writing. Around this time I joined a supporters’ club and this gave me access to new friends. I helped out in the souvenir and tuck shops on matchdays, helped repaint the ground during the summers, travelled to Israel, Norway, Denmark and Finland for European games, bought some shares in the club and wrote the odd article for the Gazette and official website.
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| The Oval Grounds, Belfast |
My day to day and week to week personal contacts with the club are cut, but 22 years after my first game (1988 Irish Cup final, Glentoran 1-0 Glenavon, Cleary pen) I stay mesmerised. Glentoran became the footprint in the soft setting concrete of my life. As I get older and further and further removed from the Oval, the print remains forever because the impression was made at just the right time.
That’s why I’m bothered. That’s why I cry in my sleep. On many levels, and looking at the person I am now, it makes no sense; but on many others it’s entirely logical.
And so, I know I haven’t exactly sold it, but if you want to make a contribution to our survival, or at least assist with our palliative care, then grab your wallet and visit http://www.spiritof41.com/.
