"Go to Old Trafford now, it’s like the fucking opera"
There’s less than two weeks to the start of the Premier League’s new season and Saturdays of utter elation or total despair. There will be a new face in amongst the usual smart crowd: my sin, my soul, my Portsmouth FC. Also known as Pompey (turn your speakers on). Yesterday The Observer ran a long piece on the city and the team. “A very unusual place” says the crime novelist Graham Hurley “and not always for the better; cut-off, mulish and inward-looking � I love the place because of its refusal to kow-tow to the style gurus … Tony Blair’s rebranded Britain hasn’t got this far, and thank God for that. It’s a city uncursed by money”.
I recognise it, mostly, particularly the isolation and lack of money, but the reporters turn a blind eye to the Brighton-but-flatter resort of Southsea at the tip of the island, and the well-stocked central library in town - my own escape pod. However, Fratton Park, the football ground, fits the picture. One fan says puts it into perspective though: football is not opera. His brother says “we have more affinity with Rochdale than with Man United. If they make Fratton Park too swanky there’s going to be something of the passion of Pompey that’s lost in the Premier. Can’t stand up, can’t smoke, can’t fart because we’re in the Premier League. What is this bollocks?” My question entirely.
Pompey’s infamous hooligan gang - that has a new book about them: Rolling with the 657 Crew � repel me and many others, though the Protestant angle the author claims for it is a personal perversion. I was glad to see that the “Scummers” nickname for our pony-fancying enemies up the M27 is (supposedly) derived from “a Portsmouth dock strike in the Fifties, when blackleg labour was brought in from the [Southampton Docks] to breach the picket lines”. Thatcher destroyed any resistance three decades on, reviving it only for the Falklands War.
The dockyard is now only a tourist attraction, and a good one, as the city is redeemed by its harbour. The sight of the ancient ships, and the new Spinnaker Tower, not to mention the Roman castle overlooking the entrance, is impressive.
The paper provides one fact I didn’t know: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was Pompey’s first goalkeeper. So was Dickens the striker?
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- English hospitality, Pompey style
- "Like most writers, Conan Doyle wrote for money"
- Medialens redesign
- A new refutation of hope
- Ascension
