Feeling Leeds , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - Raiford Guins

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107 pages

English

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Feeling Leeds gazes into the curious world of the dislocated supporter, the football fan not born and bred in the shadow of their club's ground. Raiford Guins is one such fan. His book recounts the highs and lows of supporting a team from afar - from paying $20 to watch Leeds United matches in Florida via dodgy satellite feeds in the early 1990s, to ringing Elland Road when it was the only way to get midweek results before the internet, to working out league tables with out-of-date copies of Shoot!, to celebrating madly while fuelling his car and watching Leeds clinch a late winner against Villa in December 2018 on his iPhone. Trivial to the supporter who can easily walk to their ground, such moments form the backbone of belonging for those with an ocean between themselves and the turnstiles. Feeling Leeds is the story of one supporter's commitment to cultivating an emotional connection to Leeds United for nearly 40 years. It is written by and for supporters worldwide for whom every day is an away day.

Informations

Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	10 octobre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781801503433
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022 Pitch Publishing A2 Yeoman Gate Yeoman Way Durrington BN13 3QZ

www.pitchpublishing.co.uk

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.

Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.

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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library

Print ISBN 9781801501842 eBook ISBN 9781801503433 ---eBook Conversion bywww.eBookPartnership.com

Contents

Acknowledgements Saturday, 3pm, somewhere 1. Beeston Hill, 1993 2. ‘Why did you come to Leeds?’ 3. Scarf: 1975 4. Scarf: 1986 5. Faded bucket hat, or not being in Bournemouth in 1990 6. Beans on toast at Scotland Yard, Tampa, FL 7. Mail order supporter 8. 011+44+113, or when Wednesday comes 9. Sunshiny day 10. Subbuteo, Gatwick Airport 11. Videocassettes, or lived time 12. Stupid o’clock 13. ‘Emotion captured’ playingFIFA 14. Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, a Wednesday in 2008 15. Leeds spotting 16. The Damned United 17. Remember, remember the third of January 18. If you really love me buy me a (Leeds United) shirt 19. Leeds United at 45rpm 20. Fear and loathing at Adidas shops in the US 21. We 22. Beeston Hill redux, 2017 23. Passport ready 24. REAL ID 25. Written in the sand 26. (Sticker) bombing cities 27. Office scarves 28. Three for a Fiver 29. The lift at the DoubleTree, Leeds city centre 30. Love in the age of a pandemic Conclusion: Blipped Epilogue: Marching On Together Bibliography Photos

To my son, Deck, for making the journey with me – until the world stops going round.

‘Importantly, even what is kept at a distance must still be proximate enough if it is to make or leave an impression.’

Sara Ahmed

Acknowledgements

I AM deeply indebted to the following people for their encouragement and guidance across the writing of this book: Henry Lowood, Carlin Wing, Wa lter Gantz, Rebecca Barden, Charlotte Croft, Phil Rigaud, Tony Atkins, Ellis Cashmore, Matt Knopp, Joanne Forchas and Ian Kimbrey. I wish to also thank Jane Camillin, Graham Hales, and Gareth Davis at Pitch Publishing for all of their support and assistance with this project. Shout out to Duncan Olner for designing a brilliant book cover! Special thanks to Omayra Cruz for her patience and ability to listen to so many false starts and half-baked ideas. I am eternally grateful for your belief in my ability (and need) to write this book.

Saturday, 3pm, somewhere

I HAVE invested over $90,000 in Leeds United Football Club. My contribution wasn’t covered by Sky Sports, ESP N, or any newspaper. I do not sit on the board of directors. And I do not own any equity shares in the club. A ‘foreign’ takeover isn’t likely. I am neither celebrity fan nor ex-player. I’ve only visited Switzerland, never opened a bank account there. My assets aren’t held offshore. I can also assure you that I am not an oligarch, part of a royal bloodline, or a billionaire investor. If I were a money-spinner, that amount wo uld be mere pocket change, hardly worth these words. Who am I? Nobody. One of the many global nobodies w ho supports a football club thousands of miles away from its home ground, town, city, even country. I’m the somnolent supporter who arises at stupid o’clock each Saturday morning (or Sunday) to follow my club. The $90,000 (plus interest) reflects my student loan to attend the University of Leeds in the 1990s. It was a sound investment to diversify my su pporter portfolio, if a costly way to close the distance between myself and Leeds United. The University of Leeds tendered a zone of contact. It meant that I, with international student visa in hand, would finally be there in Leeds, at E lland Road. Not for a one-off match, another tourist jaunt, but for the long haul. Back in 1994 I envisioned this acceptance as a one-way ticket. Life’s rhythm tuned into regularly walking down the long, wide steps of Beeston Hill to the ground, buying a chip butty from a food van, selecting tiny enamel football badges outside the ground, and quickly grabbing a copy of the match program along with a fanzine (The Square Balleeze into ageing turnstiles to ascend the). The mounting elation of kick-off compelled a squ eminent concrete steps of the Don Revie Stand. I wa s finally there, unremittingly among the routines, rituals, habits, and superstitious behaviours, all the ordinary, taken-for-granted, sensual and social things people do and experience at a foo tball match. I wished to dwell within this place evermore. Finally ‘being there’ was a culmination of years of support, a personal decision to leave friends and family for a career path without guarantee, not to mention accumulate sizeable debt, all in order to experience the everyday intensities of supporting Leeds United: to feel closer to, be a part of, the club I love. This love affair is far from destined. I was neither born into the club via a family line of support nor born in Leeds, neighbo uring towns and villages across West Yorkshire, or even in England. I’m from the States. Leeds is a big club with global support, so this fact shouldn’t surprise in the least. What may are the lengths those of us who aren’t local, born and bred, or in the same country as our belove d club will go to culture a meaningful connection, a sense of belonging. A recent article on the ‘future fan’ inThe Guardian by Paul MacInnes touches on the question of ‘being there’ via a different register that nevertheless resounds within this book. The majority of fans, MacInnes reports, ‘no longer watch football live in person but digitally through a screen’. This isn’t to slight either group, only to note the shifting cartography of football supporters. A polarity has arisen between ‘legacy fans’ who go to football regularly and so-called ‘digital fans’ – or the more derisive term, ‘Twitter fans’. The nature of supporting a club has changed, and this emergent demographic of ‘digital fans’ has prompted clubs – and all fans – to rethink the nature of ‘support’ and ‘engagement’. Is a ‘thumbs-up’ emoji on Facebook less of a show of support than a scarf swung overhead at Elland Road? Is the sinewy shoulder push of a squeaky turnstile surpassed by the typing of a tweet? Is playingFIFAonline a form of social interaction on a par with travelling to away matches? It’s neither a matter of deciding answers to these off-t he-cuff questions nor choosing a side, as it were, but to acknowledge thathow andwheremany support football, or identify with a club, is

being reworked, redefined, experienced diversely. Today, supporters the world over are simultaneously local and distributed. Somegoto a match; many moreswitch it on. I can’t say that I embrace being lumped into the ca tegory of ‘digital fan’ because of my location, which Google Maps tells me is 3,911 miles from Elland Road. I bump up against it out of necessity rather than choice. Supporting a club from a vast distance isn’t a new phenomenon, as anyone crammed into a British pub Stateside for an early morning kick-off in the 1980s and 1990s will affirm. Sky didn’t invent football as per the popular maxim, and many across the pond, like me, were watching the English game well before 1992. The difference today, of course, is one of scale. More watch, beyond the seating capacity of any ground. On the flipside, I wish that I could embody the status of ‘legacy fans’ and go to matches on a regular basis as I once did. This category I long to embrace out of ch oice but cannot because of economic necessity. To the tune ofTrainspotting’s opening riff: I chose a job, career, mortgage, family, my son’s college fund, insurance, car payments, hotel and airfare costs; life’s expenditures a cruel reality, grounding my many flights of fancy. I chose life, just not where I wanted to live it. I cannot inhabit the label of ‘legacy fan’, yet I do not neatly fit into the ‘digital fan’ label either. I’m not convinced that the two categories are mutually exclusive, so I will share what I have done and continue to do to show support and feel connected when ‘being there’ is more dream than reality. This short book is my attempt t o reconcile the practices of passion in the absence of place while acknowledging the reliance o n different modes of interaction across 30 years of supporting Leeds United: when ringing the ground for midweek results was the means to acquire news before the internet made such informat ion readily available, when out-of-date copies ofShoot!andMatchplucked from a newsstand became a lifeline to events transpired and the raw material for working out league tables with pen and paper, or when jumping up and down madly while pumping gas as I watched Leeds beat Villa away 3-2 on my iPhone on 23 December 2018 (to the bewilderment of rednecks at the southern Georgia gas station I stopped at when travelling to Tampa, Florida, for Christmas, a sunny pitstop on my way to a Boxing Day match at Elland Road). Moments like these, travailing for immediacy, along with many more detailed in the book, may seem superfluous to the supporter who can walk, train, or bus to the ground, but those of us with an ocean or continent between ourselves and the turnstiles rely on an assortment of objects, practices, attitudes, and sacrifices to build and s ustain our lived – if remote – complex experience of conveying and mediating our support: intimacy through frequent flyer miles, international postage, and the internet. Without the benefit of attending matches routinely across my life, I have had to fill that void with other ways of generating a feeling of belonging. I’m certainly not alone. There are a lot of us out ther e, strung across the globe. Many attend live matches only a few times a year or never actually visit the home ground of the club they support. Supporters in these circumstances cannot experience the same sense of belonging that Nick Hornby relishes towards the end ofFever Pitchdeclaring that Arsenal’s victory over when Liverpool at the 1987 League Cup ‘belonged to me every bit as much as it belonged to Charlie Nicholas and George Graham’ on account of the autho r putting in ‘more hours, more years, more decades than them’. My time invested and disparate ways of supporting suggests a different sense of belonging – one nonetheless meaningful but conditioned by the reality of distance – and this book is an attempt to share that difference. It peers into the peculiar and neglected world of the dislocated supporter, the fan who follows a foo tball club devotedly and passionately from afar.

Belonging by place Why does ‘being there’ matter? Tony Rickson’sFootball Is Better With Fansa scene sets familiar to many. Matchday, he says, ‘[Is] about meeting up with friends for a pie and a pint, walking the last bit before going inside the stadiu m, and getting a first breathtaking glimpse of the magically green grass. Then there’s the work to be done. Clapping the players as they come