Starmer’s pitch at normality

Published by The i paper (3rd July, 2024)

The reports make the game sound almost professional. Whites took the lead when a “fine, flowing movement” ended with Mark the Younger crossing for an inrushing Bob to knock in the ball at the near post. But Gel was on fine form, Moose missed a penalty and Colours ran out 4-1 winners.

This is the weekly missive that lands in my email after my Sunday game of football, including league tables and photographs snapped from the sidelines with teasing captions. Sadly, these images display a bunch of ageing, balding, sweaty and sometimes pot-bellied men, still harbouring schoolboy fantasies of scoring that glorious winning goal at Wembley.

Like many men and women, I love my weekly game of football. I play with a disparate group of north Londoners, united by an enthusiasm for the game that kicked off in childhood, who I have been with for more than two decades – and some players, far longer. Many are now in their fifties and sixties. The other day I calculated the combined age of my team’s back line was 191 – and we were only playing three in defence. The folks who play after us – with whom we have an annual match and whose games I have joined on occasion – have a player aged 73. It was run, until recently, by the man who seems set to become prime minister this week.

This is a curious community. It is filled with affection and banter and camaraderie – and occasional flare-ups – and involves people who have become good pals on the pitch over the years as they rush around in lurid lycra. Some have earned nicknames: Big Ben, Derby Dave, Mark the Elder.

Such is its strange significance in our lives that Gary, a magistrate who runs our game, says players have told him it is the highlight of their week. Yet we have little idea about the careers, families and lives of many teammates away from the sacred artificial turf. I have bumped into people in the street that I have played alongside for years, and struggled initially to recognise them when they were not wearing the shirt of their favourite Premier League team or some obscure South American side.

The group was started by someone who worked at Creation Records, the home of Oasis and infamous for excess, so some have a colourful past. I have played with members of Madness and the Sex Pistols, but also with academics, bike couriers, florists, librarians, nurses and social workers.

One teammate, who worked in financial services, surprised me by saying his cousin was standing to be president of Ghana. I discovered another had done a property deal in his twenties that meant he never worked again; perhaps that explained why he became easily bored and listless in games. James Brown, the founder of Loaded and for many years a regular, even managed to leverage a best-selling book about the strange allure of this bonding pastime for midlife blokes.

Our common denominator is adoration of football – plus the deluded belief that we might just be contenders if we could only shift a few pounds and focus more on our fitness. Like many sports, these games can strip away any artifice and reveal the reality of people’s characters.

There is the selfish one who never goes in goal, the bully who lashes out at a skilful teenager, the show-off who always dribbles, the moaner who blames everyone but himself – but also the leader who is always encouraging, the doughty defender who never gives up, the guy who was never great but always gives everything, the talent whom everyone loves to have on their team since he is so generous with the ball.

So what about Sir Keir Starmer? He is perhaps not the most skilled, but a good captain, an effective organiser and a tenacious player. He claims to be a box-to-box midfielder, which might once have been true, but certainly he is solid, hard-working and the sort of competitive character who hates losing that you want on your side.

There seem to be fewer eruptions of fury over contentious calls for penalties with the group that he ran for 10 years than with ours. He told me the central rule for his game was “don’t be an arse”. When a player once casually strolled in late delaying kick-off, he stopped the game to point out calmly how 17 other people had been left waiting, rather than show his own annoyance.

Starmer hopes to carry on playing these Sunday games if he ends up in Downing Street. “I’ll continue to play football for as long as I can possibly do so,” the 61-year-old Labour leader told an interviewer, “which is many years.” This might be a vain hope, given the job’s intensity, but it makes perfect sense to me since I have flown home from reporting jobs abroad at unearthly hours to make games in the past.

I know it gives him release from the pressures of politics – apart from my button-holing him on the halfway line to get any insights on the latest crisis for my columns – and the chance to immerse himself in an activity with people who have known him for years and treat him like any other player. Teammates will laugh or might moan when he misses an open goal – while in Westminster they attack anonymously with snide comments in the media.

Along with his family, this regular football game gives Starmer a chance of clinging to some degree of normality, and remembering his roots amid the maelstrom of modern politics. Even at our humdrum level, playing with people whose finest football years were several decades ago, we can still hope for that killer goal. And there is always Pele’s dictum that, “the more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning” – something Starmer may wish to recall in coming days.

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