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Liverpool v Leeds was excellent. the kind of game that got us all hooked on soccer in the first place. Unpredictable, exciting, dynamic and full of drama. Those two superb and timeless hits by Mo Salah and Mateusz Klich will live long in memory.
Such great football only made the melancholy of playing without fans even more intense, knowing that if Anfield were packed, he would have been an absolute buffoon.
Instead, with the silence saluting even these most outlandish abilities and emotions, it felt unreal or imitative. As wonderful as the play was, it felt like we were being asked to pretend the salad was a steak. Removing fans not only eliminates noise; he takes almost everything except real football. It is not just a missing item; almost everything is missing.
This was a movie set that was being taken for real. It was imitating instead of singing. It looked like a great soccer game and it was a great soccer game, the skills displayed were impressive, the cut and thrust of the unrestricted attacking game, exciting. But there was a ghost at the banquet. 50,000 ghosts, maybe. The empty echo where the noise should be; the emptiness of absence deeply unsettling, its stillness screaming so loud.
Anfield was like an abandoned circus, defined not by what it is, but by what it used to be. A zombie friend who looks like your old friend, but has died and has no blood in his veins. The game was like looking out the window of a normally warm, welcoming, and busy restaurant, with waiters bringing large steaming plates of delicious food to tables, but no one there to eat. It looked great, but looking was all we could do and if all we can do is look at food but never consume it, it cannot nourish us.
Yes, we can still analyze the art and science of the game, still appreciate how Klich prepared that volley and buried it, but we cannot feel it properly and football without feeling is more exhibition than competition.
So while Liverpool v Leeds was undoubtedly great football, it made the hole feel even bigger. We can discuss the value of playing without crowds and why it is happening, argue about whether it is better than nothing, or worse than nothing, but since football returned, a sadness invades him and a feeling of emptiness is always present, of so it doesn’t matter. what happens in the field, it seems that custom and convention have replaced reaction and spontaneity.
But there was no time to dwell on it because in these endlessly priapic football days every game is on TV, so without realizing that we all need a football-refractory period, West Ham’s game started quickly.
It was the same feeling of empty emptiness again. But wait. Something strange was happening.
Unlike Liverpool, the new reality felt no different than how it normally felt watching West Ham play at home.
So it was always the London Stadium and the observation of the David Moyes team. Although it was empty, it felt the same as the norm. If anything, this was even more disturbing than Anfield. While Liverpool’s game seemed disconnected from the football grid, the London stadium had never had electricity in the first place and was therefore unchanged.
The club is housed, seemingly in perpetuity, in a sports mausoleum where there is palpable sadness for lost ground, even for lost club. It’s in the building’s DNA. For those who can still hear the echoes of the Upton Park chicken coop, they must feel that they have been forced to live on a barren new planet and are very, very far from home. While there were no fans present to witness David Moyes once again throw himself on the thorns of his own words ‘that’s what I do, I win’, it made no difference. They lost.
The soulless, zombie parallels between what West Ham is like and the games without supporters in general was compelling. That feeling that something fundamental, something axiomatic of the club, of the game and even of life itself, has been stolen and eliminated, is inescapable.
Where once a vibrant local East End football club existed, carved from the local identity and forged from the spirit of the people, now there was nothing. Even when it’s full, it’s somehow empty. Soccer was happening there and that was all that could be said about it. That which made West Ham United what it was is gone. Like football without fans, it is a bloodless imitation of the real game.
I understand that some have adapted well to this new reality and, in a fair way, we all have fun where we can. Some think it is better than nothing and others prefer it. And I can still get excited when Mo Salah threw the ball to the roof of the net, it’s important to say that. Soccer is not dead. But even so, in every game something profound is missing. It won’t be dismissed or ignored, and it won’t get better over time. On the contrary, in any case.
Every game, everywhere, now feels like watching West Ham at home. That’s where we are. God helps us all.
John nicholson
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