"The Silence Of The Stands"

A review of a book by Daniel Gray.

No football book has ever made me cry before.  This one did.

Daniel Gray’s beautifully written and hugely entertaining account of watching games during the “lost season” of the pandemic is part travelogue, part social history, part personal memoir - and it’s all brilliant.

“The Silence Of The Stands” encapsulates a world of football that is rarely covered in the mainstream media but which is really the beating heart of the game in these islands, as Gray - with all the dedication of a Victorian butterfly collector - hunts down obscure non-league English grounds and blags press passes to watch Hibs and Raith Rovers.

Along the way, there are brilliant snatches of overheard conversation, which he relates with all the relish of a bobble hatted Alan Bennett (“a cup of tea would be too spicy for you”.)

He collects the chants of small town Ultras. I love the reference to Stockton Town’s “It’s wider than yours…” and there’s loads of the nerdy trivia that fuels many a football conversation (at last I’ve discovered how Billingham Synthonia got their name).

It is at times very funny, not least as the author elevates otherwise humdrum non-league encounters with his brilliant prose  (eg “The Durham midfielder wore the resigned look of a man trying to find a jar of harissa in FarmFoods. Up front for Jarrow, a centre forward darted around frenetically, as if chasing a kite during a hurricane..”).

There are also brilliant vignettes of post industrial Britain, as Gray strays into psycho geography with his walks through towns that rarely make the news, warming to the lives of ‘ordinary’ people united by their Saturday afternoon communion.

It’s sometimes said that the NHS is the closest thing we have in this country to a national religion; reading this, I’m tempted to think that football runs its close.

Bill Shankly’s brief sojourn at Workington FC is recounted with no small pathos. This episode is surely worthy of a longer treatment; in the meantime, a trip to the club’s timewarp stadium is now firmly on my ground hopper’s itinerary.

The tears (or at least a lump in the throat and a noticeable ocular moistening) came right at the end, shortly after an elegiac visit to York City, as he vindicates my (and his) years of obsessing over 22 players kicking a bag of wind around a field.

As Gray wonderfully demonstrates, football is so much more than that.

The Silence of The Stands is published by Bloomsbury.