Forever a Shaker
I took an afternoon off work
to see a parade of champions
whose fight I hadn’t cared about
just four years before
but now
meant everything to me.
The night before,
cheering every goal
with people I’ve loved
since childhood,
I wondered how odd they must have found it,
knowing,
as they did,
how unlike me this all was.
My dad had been a Shaker.
Bury FC each week at Gigg Lane.
They’d won the FA Cup a few times
nearly a hundred years before,
and somehow that was supposed to make me care
as he dragged me to each mediocre match.
Nil nil in the rain once again,
up North in the bitter cold.
He bought me the shirts and the season tickets
but never explained to me
the beautiful game.
I just saw men running around with a ball
as he watched something I wasn’t trained to see.
My favourite moment was half time.
A Mars bar and a bag of crisps.
And a break from all that boring football.
They’d meet in the pub before the match,
dad, his old school friends, and their children.
They’d talk about players and positions
I had no thoughts about.
“What do you think of their right-back?”
I’d be asked.
“Our defence has been shocking lately hasn’t it?”
And I’d stare back blankly and sip at my Coke,
wondering how to make conversation
with these other kids my age
when they all seemed to speak
only the adult’s alien language?
Back at school
no one had ever heard of Bury FC.
It was all Aston Villa and Coventry down there.
Or Manchester United and Liverpool
for those who were chasing glory.
Already a child of one immigrant
unfamiliar with so many English ways,
I felt embarrassed that I was
once again
doing the wrong thing.
Watching the wrong league
and wearing the wrong shirt,
even as I tried to fit in.
When they passed me the ball on the playground
I found I had two left feet.
Dad was around just enough to take me to Bury each time they played at home,
but not home enough
to teach me how to dribble a ball.
I dismissed the olive branch kicked at my feet
and spent my break times sitting alone
with a book
instead.
Italia ‘90 was somehow different.
On the same page
for once
with everyone else,
I cried along with Gazza
and sang along to Pavarotti.
We ate barbecued chicken in the garden,
kicking Coca-Cola sponsored red, green, and white mini footballs around
in the warm haze of the charcoal
and watched every game together
as a family.
When I was old enough
and told dad I didn’t want the Bury season ticket anymore,
that I wanted my weekends back
to spend them with my friends,
he thought it must have been the quality of the games that put me off.
After all, I had enjoyed that World Cup in 1990.
He accepted that I wasn’t a Shaker
But took me to watch the Villa instead.
A proper team in a proper league.
And I went along to humour him.
Never really noticing the difference
between Division One and Division Three football
because the Mars bars all tasted the same.
Euro ‘96 was another chance to pull me in.
I went along willingly enough as dad’s plus-one
in the UEFA pyramid scheme to earn his single ticket for the final.
So I was there when Southgate missed the penalty,
re-litigating the Second World War on a football pitch
and this time finding England wanting.
But my biggest memory of the night
(besides seeing Kevin Keegan in the car park)
was that they had Mars bars at Wembley too.
We tell ourselves stories
about who we are.
And I told myself for the longest time
that I didn’t like sports.
Even as I grew obsessed with professional wrestling
and watched basketball and baseball
on vacations to America
every opportunity that I had.
Played tennis.
Even swam.
But always against my will
because I didn’t like sports,
went the story.
The last time I played football
was in a Games lesson at school.
I never got beyond the warm up.
Had an asthma attack on the field.
And the teacher left me dying
while he put everyone into teams.
I only lived to tell the tale
because a friend called Tonya
gave me her inhaler to use.
Another reason not to like football.
I kept eating the Mars bars and grew chubby instead
as my peers ran around
and shed their puppy fat.
That tedious game my father loved
more than he seemed to love
his family.
That alien game that put a wall up
between potential friends and me.
“Which team do you support?”
A question I could only answer with shrugged shoulders
and a genuine confusion
about what support even means?
“We” didn’t win or lose:
they did.And if dad was supposed to support his home team of Bury,
why did he want me to support them too
when we only ever went there for Christmas,
Easter,
and those frequent pilgrimages to Gigg Lane?
It wasn’t my home.
But how could I support my home team
when my home town didn’t have one?
And why would I support it even if we did,
when I didn’t even support the town itself,
and dreamed only ever of getting out?
The same could be said of England
and the flags I associated only with racists.
The policies of state I felt ashamed of,
the governments I wanted out,
the monarchy I wanted abolished.
A country I lived in, was born in, but to which I felt no allegiance.
I have three passports, after all.
But there was only ever one cheer at home
during international games
despite my half-Irish dad and American mom:
“Come on England!”
And perhaps it was that which meant,
that even though I told myself
I don’t like football,
I followed every World Cup and Euros as I grew up,
albeit from a bemused and snarky distance.
What was all the fuss about? I asked myself,
tutting,
as I joined in, subtly, with all the fuss.
“Who do you support sir?”
The question came again when I started working in schools.
My teacher training began with the sound of vuvuzelas
and my dad’s last ever World Cup in 2010.
He died a month after the final,
excited to hear I was paying attention to it
at last,
even if I didn’t know any of the names.
We buried him in his Bury scarf.
A year from that
I found myself working my first proper job
in the very same school
we used to park at
when he took me to watch the Villa in Birmingham.
Forced to do duty on the playground
I staved off boredom
by watching the kids play football
and investing emotionally
in the drama of their matches.
Slowly learning the rules of the game
and being educated in technique
by their unknowing masterclass,
I grew to know whose games were worth watching,
and whose weren’t.
When staff played students for charity
I didn’t play,
but I watched,
and rooted for the boys to beat my colleagues.
When they scored,
and I cheered with genuine excitement,
it was the first time I came close to understanding
the way my father might have felt
when Bury,
or England,
scored a goal.
I worked there across three Euro tournaments
and two World Cups,
for the men.
A school for boys
in the shadow of Villa Park.
Each time I said I didn’t care
but the kids kept asking:
“Do you think it’s coming home?”
and asking me what the score was
when classes clashed with kick-offs.
For bigger matches we cancelled lessons
and put on England
on the big screen in the hall.
And sometimes I found myself watching matches at home too, after,
for no other reason
than that I wanted to.
“I think I might like football”,
I uttered to my wife
during one nail-biting penalty shoot-out.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
she asked,
and I couldn’t think of an answer.
“Maybe I never hated football,
maybe I just hated my dad?”
I offered.
“You didn’t hate your dad,”
she told me dismissively
“Things were just complicated between you.
And they are only complicated because you loved him.”
In 2022 I quit that job
in the shadow of Villa Park,
because I was done with the place
and done,
I thought,
with teaching.
Partly I was done with boys schools and all their unchallenged misogyny.
Done with men in general,
I thought.
The Lionesses therefore sounded like a tonic
to all that masculinity.
In a summer open to new opportunities
and a wide-open future,
I had time to watch a tournament.
All of the matches but none of the macho.
We watched as football finally did come home,
at last,
for those of us who cared,
and,
through tears,
Ian Wright and Alex Scott,
asked us through the TV screen to care more.
Support your local team.
Go to the matches.
Keep up the momentum.
My wife and I looked up who our local women’s team was.
Who could we support
to build something special
in women’s football?
And the answer came like poetry:
Aston Villa.
That team my dad had always had a good feeling about for his son.
We bought some season tickets,
my weekends echoing back to those early years at Gigg Lane.
Bundled in the car with talisman scarves and shirts,
packed lunches, bags of crisps, and,
of course,
Mars bars,
to spend several hours in the rowdy cold
with no guarantee of success
but a crowd of hopeful hearts.
Only this time I drove to the grounds by choice,
and watched every minute on the pitch
instead of counting down the seconds until we could go home.
Wanting goals so bad we saw stars when they came,
and feeling the crush of disappointment
when the other team won.
That year, the World Cup was different,
not just because it was in Qatar.
I watched it consciously,
not ironically,
and allowed myself,
for the first time,
to care.
Seasons passed,
as seasons do,
some better,
some worse,
and some even worse still.
Turns out it’s tough being a Villa fan.
But that’s part of the joy.
It’s the hope that kills you,
they tell me,
but we’re not dead yet.
At some point we realised
it was just as sexist
to ignore the men’s teams,
and only watch the women,
as it was to only watch the men.
Attending Villa Park, it felt strange
not knowing our history,
or who played for us
in the Premier League.
We started watching Match of the Day
and keeping up with both teams.
The men having success in the Champion’s League
Made the women’s poor season
under three different managers
an easier pill to swallow.
And soon gender didn’t matter,
as it never should.
All that mattered was that the players we cheered
wore the claret and blue.
How had I become this person?
Watching women’s World Cup matches
in an airport departure lounge
and waking up early,
in a different time-zone,
so we didn’t miss an important game?
Shirking work commitments so I could see,
along with the rest of the nation,
if Gareth Southgate could get our men
over the line at last?
When the Lionesses won the Euros
again,
and football came home
for the second time,
we bought train tickets immediately
so we could get to London and cheer.
Waving a St George’s flag for the first time in my life
at their joyful open-top bus
weeks before those flags became so toxic,
yet again,
in the hands of toxic men.
And now here we are,
a season later,
another World Cup on the way,
and,
last week,
the Europa League final of 2026.
A cancelled work dinner so I could watch
and share the excitement
of ninety minutes in Istanbul
with loved ones and strangers
all united as Villans
under one happy roof.
Then bunking off work early the next day
so I could get to town in time
to cheer and wave
at another open-top bus
filled with victorious heroes
just as drunk and joyful
as the women I’d cheered before.
Who have I become?
This devoted fan of football?
The sort of person my younger self would have assumed they had
nothing in common with?
Whoever I am,
I only wish I had become him before my father died.
So we could have finally had the conversations that he wanted to have all along
about football.
But better late than never.
A win in extra time
is still a win.
And now that I understand,
I paid to have his name
carved into the walls of his beloved Gigg Lane.
“Forever a Shaker”
says the memorial brick.
And though he might have raised a Villain,
I think he would be proud.