Sporting Aspects
Summer into Spring
By J. P. W. MALLALIEU HE seasons of the year at least have the debency to infiltrate. It's not summer one day and winter the next. Instead there are weeks of warning touches in the even- ing air and here and there a tell-tale leaf falling long before the cascade.
But the sporting seasons have no such delicacy. True, in the mid-summer of early August, when the noon-time sun is still near its zenith and the grass, in a good year, is turning to corn-yellow, there are rumblings from the far North. But only Scotsmen and pool promoters notice them. The rest of us continue on tiptoe at the Oval or sit in reasonable ease at Lord's, Old Trafford or Bramall Lane; and the back pages of newspapers are still full of such civilised headlines as " Hutton's Steady Batting " or " Compton Flays Kent."
Then, suddenly, before the leaves have begun to turn, let alone fall, the iron curtain comes down with a clang. The Festival matches at Scarborough or Hastings or Kingston lose themselves in the small ads and even the last struggle for the championship is fought in silence, like a television play when something has gone wrong with the sound. For football has come in like a herd of buffaloes and has trampled the gentler cricket under its feet.
In these early days of football, a few of us try- to preserve the proprieties. The Times, for example, and the Observer continue to give at least half-hearted columns to cricket while printing the football results only in their natural bareness as something too indecent for comment. I myself glare at the sellers of Football Annuals whose scrannel voices pierce the long silences of cricket grounds. I concentrate, with ruffled intentness, on the white figures before me or cling to the lengthening shadows of the pavilion. I brood upon Hutton's cover drive or on Lock's spinning magic and I try to imagine that summer is yet young. 1 try to put the clock back in the invader's face.
But each year I know that it is a losing fight. Within a few days my resentment has diminished into curiosity and thence stirred once again into tingling expectancy until suddenly I find myself breathless in the bubbling flow of a football crowd on its way to the ground and the sadness for what has been is brushed away by the• eagerness for what _ is to come.
This year I had a special expectancy about my opening match, for I was going to Boundary Park where thirty-four Years ago I had seen professional football for the first time. Then Oldham Athletic were a proud team in the First Division and their 44.000 capacity ground was well filled by the spinners and pieceners and doffers who were the pride and the whole of this booming cotton town, a town from which well-paid work seemed to stretch to the. ends of the world. But soon someone was to snip the strands which tied foreign markets so delicately to Oldham. The mules ceased to glide to and fro, the spindles ceased to chatter. With no money in their Pockets except the most meagre of doles, the cotton operatives Could no longer afford shillings or even sixpences to come to Boundary Park; and with its support falling away Oldham Athletic was able to survive only by selling its best players to other clubs. With its best players gone, it subsided into the Second Division and at last slouched into the Third and there bumped along the bottom, only surviving in senior foot- ball at all because its goalkeepers got so much practice that they could command a high price from other clubs in the transfer market. During those long years, Boundary Park was bleak and cheerless. Even when the ground is full, the immediate pros- pect is pretty vile. From the stands you look across hopeful Whitewashed terraces on to short, squat houses built in rows of deadly straightness, and on to nineteen long squat mills, made, like the houses, out of that strident Accrington brick. But the prospect is at least more cheerful when smoke is coming from the mills. When it was not coming, during those long years, Boundary Park -and Athletic became jokes as bitter to Oldham as life itself.
But after the war things were changed. The mills were in work again and, perhaps even more happily, many new industries had come into the town. Once again, after that long interval, spectators had enough money to come back to the Park; and the Club, with its support thus renewed, soon had enough money to buy or train new players. Gradually the plait improved until last season it won the championship of the Third Division North and so, this season, found itself in the Second Division after eighteen years. As I walked down the narrow cinder lane which leads to the ground, saw the championship pennant flying above the stand, and felt the jostlings of the cheerful crowd, 1 thought that Oldham football and Oldham itself were back at last to form.
I was wrong about Oldham football. Mind you, these hard grounds of early season are meant, not for football, but for cricket. On them a football gambols like a lamb and will not be controlled by anything short of supreme artistry. Neither Plymouth Argyle nor Oldham Athletic possessed this. They were unskilled labourers out of practice at labouring. The ball just teased them. Players were exasperated, but the ball thoroughly enjoyed itself. Throughout the game it was caught only twice, once in the Oldham net and once in the Plymouth net; but both these scores came before half-time and thereafter the ball did as it pleased.
But if Oldham football was not yet back to form, Oldham itself was. Their team, after six matches, has not yet won a victory. It is at the bottom of the Division. As I have said, its football is uninspiring. Yet the spectators were neither depressed nor cynical. They crowded the stands and terraces and flung themselves into the game. Every move of an Oldham player was accompanied by advice, encouragement and warning from the crowd and when, at last, an Oldham player scored, the goal was greeted by a shout which shook the soot of Mumps. Bridge and rattled what remain of the granite setts in the byways of the town. That shout seemed more than just the climacteric of 22,000 football fans. It seemed, rather, the cry of a new-born baby when first he draws air into his lungs. It seemed a shout of triumph over the past and a challenge to the future. It seemed like the sound of the angels in the hymn, singing aloud because the night is done. It seemed to say: the past is dead and we have been reborn. If, when football comes, Oldhamers can really feel that it is Spring again, who am I to complain that football is trampling upon what remained of my Summer ? And yet. . . . Just as I do not forget the past glories of this cricketing season, so I cannot forget the past miseries which I saw but did not share in Oldham during my child- hood—the empty streets, black and glistening in the rain, the listless queues at the Labour Exchange, prices marked down so low that they cut the producer's throat, and children unkempt, and even unsmiling, on the kerb. Such things could happen again; for Oldham is still too dependent on one industry. I think of these things and, thinking of them, hope that Oldham Athletic, which is a barometer for the fortunes of Oldham itself, will never again relapse into the Third Division. I hope, indeed, that the early season buoyancy which makes all football fans feel that good things are probable and bad things impossible, will persist for years to come. I hope that the full-throated roar I heard lag Saturday will be so often repeated that Mumps Bridge will become sootless even though the mills stay smoky. Both Athletic and Oldham itself deserve a long break.
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