Scoreline Man sat a couple of rows down from me at a non-league ground I visit half a dozen times a year. He had a face as crumpled and weather-beaten as an aged conker and always wore the same dove grey, Velcro-fasten, wide-fit loafers. In my mind I called him Cosy Shoe Man. On arrival and departure we nodded to one another, or raised our eyebrows and tilted back our heads in rueful acknowledgement of a scrappy 0-0, or an unfortunate defeat.
The only time we spoke came after one of those, an egregious 0-3 in which the home side struck the woodwork so often in the second period it was practically a drum roll. “Unlucky,” I said. Cosy Shoe Man pulled a face. “One of those results that in no way reflects the scoreline,” he replied in a low nasal tone. After that I thought of him as Scoreline Man. For a dozen years Scoreline Man was a small fixture in my life. Then one matchday he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there the next time I went either, nor the next and soon his absence had ceased to be noteworthy, a broad loafer print slowly faded.
He is just one of a legion of fans I’ve known well enough to acknowledge, but never befriended. At the same ground a tall, perpetually damp-looking chap, lonely as a heron, clung to the perimeter fence like a sailor in a storm. Every match, as time elapsed in the second half, he would call out, just once, “Come on, boys, dig deep” in a timbre so melancholy it was more like the baleful howl of a distempered hound than any form of encouragement. Dig Deep Bloke disappeared sometime after a 1-0 home win in the FA Vase over a burly team of sweary blokes from the South Yorkshire coalfields.
In the seat across the aisle sat a middle-aged woman with a baked-on tan, fun-fur ear muffs and a dog so tiny it might have been a gerbil, who called out in a voice as strident as a starling, “Away, liner what’s the matter with yees?” following every offside. (“Ah, the WAG’s here,” the bloke in front of me would remark without fail after the first one.) Tiny Dog Lady went at the end of one relegation-haunted season and never returned. WAG Lad – balding and emitting the odour of throat lozenges – is still there, though in her absence he lacks a catchphrase. There are dozens, probably hundreds, of others who have gone MIA from my life over the past four decades – claimed by what? A new job? A new relationship? A new start? Death, dementia, DIY? I never knew them well enough to find out.
Last week, close by where Scoreline Man once perched, I sat with one of the supporters I have come to know well enough to chat cheerfully with about football for 90 minutes, but not well enough to be aware of their employment or marital status, or indeed where they live (because such things are of minor importance when you can be debating when goalies started wearing gloves, or recalling the castanet clatter of local TV football presenter George Taylor’s false teeth).
“I’m glad to see you,” he said with unexpected enthusiasm, “because, you know this new centre-back they’ve got at Sunderland? Well, you and me were at a Northumberland Senior Cup game together in December 2019 and he was playing. Do you remember him?” I shook my head. “To be honest,” I said, “I don’t even remember the game.”
“Me neither,” he replied. “But when they said what teams he’d played for, I looked it up in my file.” “Your file?” I said. “It’s a bit silly really,” he said, “but every game I come to, I photograph the teamsheet, take an action shot of the players and write a note of the score, who I watched the game with and who was the best player, then I save it on the computer.”
I go to around 40 matches a season, but compared to this man I was a lightweight, a weekend warrior. “And you do that for every game?” He nodded. “That must be a big file,” I said. “Aye,” he said with a tinge of pride. “We’re definitely in megabyte territory.”
Now I wonder if I should have made a file, too. Not of the teams and players, but of the supporters who’d gone. Because often football is the place we come to escape our everyday fears, to replace them with others more temporary and less terrible. Every one of those we nod to or notice plays a small part in keeping us sane. They deserve some kind of memorial.
