Hating Football by Andrew O’Hagan (London Review of Books, 27 June

2002).

I can tell you the exact moment when I decided to hate football for life. It was
11 June 1978 at 6.08 p.m. Scotland were playing Holland in the first stage of
the World Cup Finals in Argentina. It happened to be the day of my tenth
birthday party: my mother had to have the party after my actual birthday
owing to a cock-up involving a cement-mixer and the police, but the party was
called for that afternoon, and the cream of St Luke’s Primary School turned up
at 4 p.m., armed with Airfix battleships and enough £1 postal orders to keep
me in sherbet dib-dabs for a month.

Things started to go badly the minute my father rolled into the square in a
blue Bedford van. He came towards the house in the style of someone in no
great mood for ice-cream and jelly, and within minutes, having scanned the
television pages of the Daily Record, he threw the entire party out of the living
room – Jaffa Cakes, Swizzle Sticks, cans of Tizer, the lot – all the better to
settle down to a full 90 minutes with Ally’s Tartan Army, now taking the field
in Mendoza.

A full cast of Ayrshire Oompa-Loompas (myself at the head) was then

marched upstairs to a requisitioned boxroom, where several rounds of pass-
the-parcel proceeded without the aid of oxygen. I managed to eat an entire
Swiss roll by myself and take part in several sorties of kiss, cuddle or torture
before losing my temper and marching to the top of the stairs. From there,
looking through the bars, I could see the television and my father’s face.
Archie Gemmill, at 6.08, wearing a Scotland shirt with the number 15 on the
back, puffed past three Dutch defenders and chipped the ball right over the
goalie’s head. The television was so surprised it nearly paid its own licence fee,
and my father, well, let’s just say he stood on the armchair and forgot he was
once nearly an altar-boy at St Mary’s.

My school chums were soon carried out of the house on stretchers, showing all
the signs of a good time not had, by which point my mother was mortified and
my father was getting all musical. ‘We’re here to show the world that we’re
gonnae do or die,’ he sang unprophetically, ‘coz England cannae dae it coz
they didnae qualify.’ My birthday was spoiled, and I decided always to hate
football and to make my father pay. I had a hidden stash of books in a former
breadbin upstairs – the revenge of the English swot! – and I went out to the
swingpark to read one and to fantasise about becoming the West of Scotland’s
first international male netball champion.

Hating football was a real task round our way. For a start, my brothers were
really good at it; the fireplace had a line of gold and silver strikers perched
mid-kick on alabaster bases, and they turned out to be the only part of the
fireplace where my father wouldn’t flick his cigarette ash. For another thing, I
went to a school where Mr Knocker, the teacher, was football-daft, and he’d
sooner you packed in Communion than afternoon football. But Mark
McDonald – my fellow cissy – and I broke his spirit after he gave us new
yellow strips to try on. We absconded from the training session and stretched
the shirts over our knees, all the better to roll down Toad Hill in one round
movement before dousing the shirts in the industrial swamp at the bottom.
The destruction of footballing equipment was beyond the pale: we were too
young for Barlinnie Prison, so we got banned to Home Economics instead and
were soon the untouchable kings of eggs Mornay.

My father gave up on me. Mr Knocker put me down for a hairdresser and a

Protestant. But there was always my Uncle Peter, a die-hard Celtic supporter –
not like my brothers, but a real Celtic supporter, the sort who thought Rangers
fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea
oilrigs for no pay – and Uncle Peter for a while appointed himself the very
man who would, as he delicately put it, ‘get all that poofy shite oot his heid
before it really does him some damage’.

Game on. But not for long. Uncle Peter arranged to take me to see Celtic and
Rangers play at Hampden Park. He was not unkind and had put some
planning into the day out, but not as much planning as I had: for a whole week
it had been my business to make sure that the only clothes available for me to
wear to the treat were blue. For the uninitiated, I should say that Celtic fans
tend not to wear blue, especially not to the football, and never, in all the rules
of heaven and earth, to a Rangers game.

My uncle was distressed. He called me a Blue Nose to my face (strong words

for a bishop) and when we arrived at the ground he made me walk behind
him. He said that if Rangers scored and I made a noise he would throw me to
the Animals (the stand in Celtic Park where men peed and drank Bovril was
affectionately known as the Jungle). When Celtic lost the game 1-0 he called
me a Jonah and said everything was lost with me and I should stick at school
because I was bound to end up at university or worse.

Easier said than done. Academic distinction at our secondary school was
mostly a matter for the birds, so the best a boy could do was to set his mind on
surviving four years of PE without ending up in the Funny Farm (Mrs Jess’s
remedial class, only marginally more humiliating than being excluded from
the school team). It was a wonderful education in the intricacies of human
nature. I had pals, good pals, and as a resident smoker at the corner and a
fearless talker-back to the nuns, I was in a position to feel confident about
their loyalty when we came before Mr Scullion, the chief lion at the gym hall.

Not a bit of it. No sooner had Scullion given some Kenny Dalglish-in-the-
making the chance of picking a football team than all affection and loyalty
would fall away like snow off a dyke. First lesson: let nothing stand in the way
of winning. My good-at-football erstwhile mate would choose one loon after
another – a bandy-legged chaser here, a cross-eyed soap-dodger there – until
the teams were nearly complete, except for me and Mark McDonald and some
poor dwarf called Scobie left glistening with shame on the touchline. A new
deputy headmaster came to the school; you could tell by looking at his hair
that he was all brown rice and liberal experiment, so I wrote him a well-
spelled note about reversing the method used for the picking of teams. I
remember the day and the very hour.

‘O’Hagan,’ the PE assistant said, ‘pick your team.’

I walked the few yards onto the field like General Patton contemplating the
sweep of his 3rd Army over France. ‘Scobie,’ I said, ‘McDonald.’ And so it went
on until every lousy player in the group had smilingly succumbed to an early
invitation from the worst football picker in the history of St Michael’s
Academy. My hand-picked Rovers and I got beat 12-0.

When I was 12, I had nearly run out of juice on the football-hating front; it was
an exhausting business not playing the game. But then I had an idea of quite
intense perversity. Even my friend Mark had to shake his head sadly and note
that in the arsenal of anti-football weaponry my new device was just too much:
for a moment he pitied my trophy-winning brothers, he truly felt for my
Scotland-deluded dad. I had gone nuclear: Jacqueline Thompson’s School of
Ballet.
Ah, the pleasures of disownment. Before setting off to Dancewear in Glasgow
to buy my first set of pumps, however, I was dragooned by the seething
Scullion to take part in a hateful five-a-side against Kilwinning Academy.
What happened? With only two minutes to go I ran into the ball with the
ferocity of a POW making a dash for the barbed wire. Reader, I broke my leg.
As I fell to the ground in agony I was sure the sylphides were coming to fetch
me en point, but – after even more delusion – I woke up in Kilmarnock
Infirmary wearing a plaster cast the size of Siberia, and my father drove me
home in perfect silence. The years have passed now, but I can still see him
smiling in the audience many months later, the night of Jacqueline
Thompson’s Christmas Dance Display at the Civic Centre in Ayr, as his
youngest son came onto the stage, football boots and socks pristine, whistle in
mouth, to make his first appearance onstage in a dance number called – I
swear to God – ‘Match of the Day’.