It is such a wonderful game: essentially simple in its conception, in practice it yields the most remarkable complexities. Character, attitude, athleticism, alertness, intelligence, intuition, balance, physique and stamina are all important factors in making a footballer what he or she is. Each one of us is a cocktail but the different elements are there, mixed in widely different measures in all of us, and football tests this, and reveals it, in the most powerful and illuminating way. There is therefore a cerebral pleasure in both watching and participating in it.
But there is another dimension to playing, that is harder to express. The physical enjoyment is obvious: the running and the jumping and the tackling that allow us to explore the potential that s there in the body for physical expression and endeavour.
However, it goes further than this, into an area of human experience that is frequently defined as zen . While much of the game is about asserting yourself, of making your presence felt, there are those magical moments when adrenaline and intuition and athleticism combine and things happen things are done that could only be expected in a moment of complete spontaneousness, when all of the normal inhibitions are comprehensively shed; drawing on the subconscious to calculate instantaneously how, and where, and at what angle, you have to throw yourself to make that overhead kick or diving header, there is, or can be, a moment of absolute release, when nothing else matters except the action itself, and the pure improvisation that makes it possible. And you pick yourself up and wonder: did that really happen?
Knowing this, and all the other myriad dramas and joys that football inspires, I can sometimes feel at a loss, trying to explain how and why I abandoned any interest in the game, for such a long time. Last week, however, it all came back, with a vengeance.
In Istanbul, in the run-up to the UEFA Cup semi-final, two supporters of Leeds United were butchered by fans of the Turkish club Galatasaray. The immediate, knee-jerk reaction was to heap bile and odium on the Turks, and to depict what happened as a vicious and deadly attack on innocent English football supporters. Of course there is a grain of truth in this: the knives were Turkish, and it is probably true that the most hardline Galatasaray supporters are more likely than most to carry lethal weapons of this kind. And, for the record, there is no evidence that either of those individuals who were killed had been involved in any wrongdoing or provocation. But the terrible pain that has been inflicted on their families and loved ones springs from a deeper root cause in essence, the same one that drove me away from football, all those years ago.
It was at a time when men were asking questions of themselves in a way that had never occurred to people before about women s role in the world and how men limited and controlled it in all sorts of ways that were both overt and insidious. In particular, the question of male violence was being addressed from a new and different perspective, and all of the codes and clubs were male-only preserves that seemed to harbour and encourage it. And in that context there were certain expressions of maleness, or male culture at any rate, from which I, for one, was moved to recoil.
It wasn t just that, at the time, football was almost exclusively a male game of interest that seemed to rudely exclude women though that was certainly part of it. What I really found utterly repulsive and objectionable was the cult of the football fan. And what I found most objectionable was the poisoned stew of hatred for the other that seemed to be part of it. The 70s was probably the time when football hooliganism was at its worst; support for the game had been usurped by brutish mobs, fuelled by a combination of testosterone, alcohol, a propensity towards violence and an utter disregard for their fellow human beings. These mobs were out on a Saturday, and with football as their chosen arena of activity, set about creating an atmosphere as deeply sick, twisted and intimidating as it would be possible to imagine in the circumstances of attending a sporting occasion.
Now there s a complex social history to the phenomenon, and a political history too, as far-right groups spotted an opportunity and exploited it. But it goes deeper than that, in that the desire to identify, as a football fan of a particular team, seems to draw on and therefore intensify some crude and atavistic element in the human psyche. Sometimes it makes me laugh, seeing the extent to which grown adults submerge their intelligence and their identity in this amorphous entity that is the support for a particular football club.
But mostly I find it deeply unsettling and disturbing. Because so often you see people particularly here in Ireland, where fans are at a very significant remove from the source of the original feelings of identification or opposition descend into a posture of hatred and resentment that is utterly irrational, and that has within it the seeds of something even darker and more dangerous.
In Britain, this is most manifest in the horribly corrupt sectarianism of the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow. But you only have to tune in to what s going down in the crowds at football games to get a flavour of just how seriously malevolent and full of poison human beings can be. It is one thing, supporting a club or a country. But among the majority of fans, it seems obligatory to sacrifice your intelligence, your taste, your feelings, your discretion, your judgement, your sense of fair play and justice, in order to worship with the mob at the chosen shrine; and equally to be capable of joining with that mob in orchestrated outbursts of songs and chants and actions that are to one degree or another loaded with bile, hatred and hostility.
Behaving like louts is too often par for the course. It is certainly an integral part of football culture in England, and it is there too in Italy as the overt racism of Lazio supporters confirmed recently and in Holland and in Turkey. And there was the pathetic spectacle recently, at a Shamrock Rovers v Bohemians game here, of a sordid little copycat episode of football-related violence. Pass the sick-bag.
It is from this profoundly stupid and moribund aspect of football culture and what it says about the awful immaturity of so many of us males that I recoiled all those years ago. And it is this same aspect of football culture that led, not inevitably but remorselessly, to the death of Christopher Loftus and Kevin Speight, supporters of Leeds United, in Istanbul last week.
The terrible thing is that, for so many people, it goes to the heart of what being a football supporter means. If you re one of them, the double murder in Istanbul might just give you pause, to think again.