Sing Yer Hearts Out - A Tale of Two Footballing Weekends

The weekend of July 23/24th saw two highlights for me. The second, on the Sunday, was the epic Command and Colors Austerlitz game already described in these pages. The first, the previous day, was a trip down to Chichester to meet up with family, have a jolly nice meal at the Minerva brasserie and see a play at the attached Minerva Theatre. The play in question was Sing Yer Heart out for the Lads, a gritty story about racism and xenophobia in the context of English football so very much a story for our times. 

My wife and I go to see plays very rarely and we are really not au fait with dramatic conventions in the way some of our family are – my nephew, for example, is a regular theatre-goer and reviewer known in the Blogosphere as The Real Chrisparkle so his blog is probably the best place to start for a fuller review of the performance. What I can say is that it was not only an interesting experience – interesting rather than enjoyable – but it also provided a thought-provoking contrast with the footballing extravaganza of the following weekend. 

The play is set in a scruffy London boozer – very realistically staged, to the extent that it was tempting to go and get a beer from the functioning beer pumps when the interval came – during the October 2000 World Cup qualifying match between England and Germany at the old Wembley. (Anyone not wanting to know the result should look away now. It was 1-0 to Germany, the last goal at the old Wembley Stadium being scored by Liverpool midfielder Dietmar Hamann). A group of fans settle in to watch the game but frustration at the England performance soon gives rise to aggressive expressions of racism and other hate speech, with ultimately tragic results.

Not looking too good for England; tensions starting to simmer in Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads

It's an earnest cautionary tale that feels like one worth telling. Racism is bad, footy has a problem with it, English footy in particular has a problem with it, the toxic mix of footy and racial violence part of a wider culture in which issues of racism, xenophobia and the loss of status and Empire have never been satisfactorily resolved. For me, as for Chrisparkle, the play didn’t really go anywhere dramatically beyond horrible racist people being horrible and racist. The heart of the second act, in which Alan, a well-read Enoch Powell quoting racist, plays pool with Mark, one of the black characters, while calmly outlining his racial philosophy and telling Mark why he does not belong in the UK, should feel tense but does not, as it feels as though both characters are effectively just being used as mouthpieces for opposing worldviews. 

(It was perhaps unwise to have the actual footy game playing on a TV in the background. There were periods of the play when I found myself distractedly following that old 2000 game instead of listening to what was being said onstage and I’m sure there were others in the audience who did the same). 

I also found the characters tended to be caricatures…the calm and sinister Alan, a cerebral, ideological racist who has read all of his books and is more in favour of persuasion and considered action than undirected violence; the thuggish Lawrie, clearly in awe of Alan’s superior learning but hot-headed, impatient and constantly close to losing all restraint; Mark, a black man recently out of the Army and disillusioned at the failure of English society to fully accept him despite his best efforts to fit in. 

But then, this sense of caricature comes from the fact that these are real figures with whom I think we are all familiar in real life. We know people like Alan who are smart and have read all the books and managed to learn all the wrong things from them. He reminded me mostly of a boy I remembered from the Sixth Form in Liverpool who, having expressed the most appalling views on race, calmly informed me that he preferred to be regarded as a racialist than a racist. We also know people like Lawrie. Thuggishness in English football is never very far below the surface. The pub portrayed in Sing Yer Heart Out feels familiar, down to the moth-eaten taped-down carpets and the perfunctory St Georges Cross bunting; and if I had been out and about looking for somewhere to watch that match back in 2000 and had come across that pub I would have recognized it for what it was and carried on walking. 

Fast forward a week and there could scarcely be a more striking contrast with the football offering of the following weekend: *that* European Championship Final between the English and German womens’ teams that ended – against all expectations, surely, this being England-Germany – with the England women dancing around the pitch with the trophy while a nation cried and yelled itself hoarse.

Much has been written about the utter joyousness of the Womens’ Euros and it is certainly a novel experience for an England supporter to be able to just enjoy a football tournament without any of the usual accompanying baggage. On the pitch, none of the usual huffing and puffing as a team of overpaid prima donnas gives another lacklustre performance and goes out to a team of part-timers from a country nobody even knew had a team – or, just as badly, going out on penalties to an infuriatingly efficient Germany for the three hundred thousandth time. Off the pitch, none of the spectacles associated with England football supporter culture: drunken, sunburned, topless men with enormous beer-bellies brawling outside stadia or using any nearby street furniture as a public urinal. None of the hate, or the ugliness, or the gloomy soul-searching amidst the ruins when it is all over. 

I’m not quite sure why this is so. Is it the case that most of the appalling behaviour is down to a relatively small number of toxic males who are exactly the sort of men who would regard it as beneath their dignity to turn out for a team of girls? Or is it that with the womens’ game hitherto attracting much less coverage and lower advertising revenues than the mens’ it was felt that the result was much less consequential, that there was therefore less ‘pride’ on the line as a nation? I recall a chant featured in Sing Yer Hearts Out that went ‘Stand up if you won the War’ (to the tune of Go West, of course), and this strange and strangely English conflation of football and bad World War II history might perhaps seem even more tenuous than normal when the players are female. 

As someone who has watched and enjoyed womens’ football in the past (notably the epochal 2019 World Cup where the England women started to become household names) it’s interesting to note a certain concern on the part of some commentators that the womens’ game is becoming in some ways more like the mens’, and that we are in danger of going down the same ill-advised path. The arguably cynical play of the German players, playing a rough physical game against their opponents in hope of a reaction; the timewasting which when done by the English players was consistently described euphemistically as ‘game management’; even midfielder Liz Scott’s foul-mouthed reaction to a German challenge that you really didn’t have to be a very able lip-reader to pick up (how many at home must have cried out, with me, ‘Hey, she just told that German player to **** off!’); the assumption is that women should be above all this and should conduct themselves elegantly and demurely on the pitch and off it. 

Chloe Kelly celebrates scoring the winner against Germany; I say, there's a half naked woman on the pitch.

An unreasonable expectation surely. Given that these women are consumers of the same footballing culture as the rest of us it is absurd to regard this time as one of the loss of innocence. Maybe it is just that the simian male culture surrounding football has been so unpleasant for so long that when the reasonable behaviour of a group of reasonable people is suddenly inserted it feels somehow unnatural and hence fragile. 

I’m just thankful for all the great football of the last few weeks, for goals like Georgia Stanway’s rocket against Spain that stand alongside such beautiful pieces of work as that Paul Gascoigne goal against Scotland at Wembley in 1996, or Russo's cheeky backheel against Sweden; grateful also for the experience of being able to cheer on an England team without the slightly uncomfortable feeling that I’m participating in something a bit dodgy. Only time will tell if this really is a defining moment for the womens' game for all the wrong reasons, whether its ever higher profile and the dizzying amount of money likely to be poured into the game will result in its corruption. All I know is that I am much more tempted to tune in to the womens' world cup next year than to the bloodsoaked money making exercise scheduled for Qatar in November, cynical even by FIFA standards. And I’ll leave the final word to David Squires of the Guardian: "Sod it, I’m a 47-year-old man with a creaking hip and a BMI so-called GPs would describe as ‘troubling’, but even I harbour dreams of being Fran Kirby when I grow up".