MATCH 7: Solidarity Forever: FC Deportivo Galicia vs. AFC Hayes

FC Deportivo Galicia 1 AFC Hayes 1 (Combined Counties Division One)
Bedfont Recreation Ground, 29 September 2020

 

 

Being shut out of Carrow Road means not seeing some old friends for the foreseeable future, but it has also provided plenty of ways to make new ones. When I told people I was doing this blog, some - including a few not normally into football - said they wanted to join me at these matches. This added an extra layer to the project: initially, I was looking for clubs that would be interesting to visit for reasons beyond mere convenience. Now, I was also looking to match each club with the best potential companion - someone with a link to a team's area or past, or who might share my interest in a club's political, historical or cultural significance.

 

When I read cultural critic Orit Gat's essay about Zinedine Zidane and French society in The White Review - the opening chapter of a football book she's writing called If Anything Happens - I knew I wanted to go to a match with her. Having followed her work for some time, I looked at my list of teams to visit and thought she might be intrigued by FC Deportivo Galicia, set up in west London in 1968 by a group of Galician migrants fleeing Franco's Spain, and rose up the pyramid during the 1990s (around the same time as Deportivo de La Coruña's golden age, in fact) to the Combined Counties League. I'd never heard of them before this season - I knew a few players had come to England during the Spanish Civil War, including Emilio Aldecoa, Sabino Barinaga, José Gallego and Raimundo Pérez Lezama, but not an entire club founded near the end of the fascist dictatorship. As interested in my football writing as I was in hers, and sharing my curiosity about this Spanish club in London, Orit agreed to come with me, and we both knew well in advance that we'd find plenty to talk about.

When we met, I told Orit I'd decided not to write up every game - it was just too much work, especially as I was going to several matches a week in the absence of much else to do, and I thought it might be nice to keep some things just for myself. On the night before this, I'd seen Leatherhead again, away at Haringey Borough with my friend Andi (who previously joined me at Balham), and had enjoyed it, as Haringey had a vibrant fanbase. I found little to say about the game that I haven't already written here, though, as Andi and I talked further about the collapse of the blogging circle, and how this project hasn't found a wider network to support it. (One reason why I didn't write about going back to Horley Town on Saturday for their 4-0 win over East Preston, or seeing Wingate & Finchley lose to Bowers & Pitsea on Sunday - four games in four days!) It got me thinking about how, of all the bloggers, Andi was the only one with whom I'd formed a lasting friendship, having a similar interest in the socio-political issues around football while also trying not to take it with stifling seriousness, being as moved by petty squabbles between Dulwich Hamlet and Leatherhead as by the greatness of Bayern Munich or Barcelona over the last ten years (and both agreeing that Half Man Half Biscuit provided the greatest summary of what's wrong with modern football culture in just one verse).

 

It took a while for Orit and I to find each other: Deportivo Galicia play at Bedfont Recreation Ground, sharing with Bedfont Sports. It backs onto Bedfont & Feltham's ground, The Orchard; she went to the right club, I didn't. We got a drink in the bar, which was decorated with famous football quotes - I wondered, aloud, if Bill Shankly would have said his line about it being more important than life or death if he'd been at Heysel or Hillsborough and Orit, a Liverpool fan who grew up in Israel, said she preferred Jürgen Klopp's description of football as "the most important of the unimportant things", something Klopp has repeated amidst the pandemic. We had both written about watching football in the age of Covid-19 - me about the sadness of not going to Norwich, and Orit about the strange audio-visual changes it had brought about for TV viewers, especially those watching Liverpool finally claim the Premier League title. Our ways of watching football were very different: Orit had grown up near Hapoel Tel Aviv, the most left-wing club in Israel, but didn't go to games because of the constant threat of terrorism. It wasn't easy to watch games on TV either, as there was only one channel - a stark contrast to my youth, when I went several times a season to Norwich games and watched no end of English league and international matches on television.

We immediately got into the politics of football - the lack of anything in England's higher levels comparable to the sectarianism of Celtic and Rangers, let alone the ultra-nationalism of Beitar Jerusalem and their fans' intense hostility to the club signing two Chechen Muslims in 2013 (captured in the documentary Forever Pure). She was researching the history of Hakoah Vienna, the Jewish club that won the Austrian league in 1924-25, before its players either left for Mandatory Palestine or died in the Holocaust after the club was dissolved, days after the Anschluss. We talked about how some of football's most successful individuals had been less willing to consider the politics of their positions: Sepp Herberger managed Germany, and then West Germany, between 1936 and 1964, keeping hundreds of pages of notes and diaries that mentioned nothing but football. That led us onto more recent figures such as John Barnes and of course Zinedine Zidane who preferred to let their feet do the talking as they became reluctant figureheads in struggles against racism. (I couldn't help but wonder how popular Zidane, now as synonymous with Real Madrid, famously backed by General Franco, as he is with the Franco-Algerian community, was amongst Deportivo Galicia's supporters.)

We talked so much, trying to cram in everything we wanted to say to each other about the art and politics of football, that I missed the line-ups, although we soon gathered that most if not all of Deportivo's players were Spanish speakers. We stood by the halfway-line and kept up our conversation as the game unfolded, with Hayes having more of the ball and looking a little more threatening but Galicia attacking on the break, with a striker missing horribly from close range before Anas Igozouln (who previously played for a club called The Curve, named after a North Kensington community centre that supported people affected by the Grenfell Tower fire, and had many players of North African origin before they folded in September 2019) put Deportivo ahead right on half-time.

During the break, we got on literature, discussing Svetlana Alexeivich and Isabel Allende, who Orit was reading. (Apt, I felt, as I'd just finished watching Patricio Guzmán's Battle of Chile.) We shared our love of writers and thinkers who took sport seriously, from Roland Barthes to David Foster Wallace, and of David Goldblatt's magnificent Marxist history, The Ball is Round, that spanned from the English public schools of the 1850s to 21st century Africa and Asia in a thousand breathless pages. Neither of us had read any football books by women, however - not even Jennifer Doyle, whose From a Left Wing was a highlight of the blogging circle, had published one, and I hope someone takes on Orit's book and starts to rectify this absence.

 

We got drawn back into the match as Hayes equalised soon after the restart, as we moved to the main stand in front of a group of Deportivo ultras in the club's blue and white scarves. My favourite reminder of their Anglo-Spanish status came as a Deportivo player raced down the left wing: a woman shouted "Vamos, vamos, vamos!" as he beat a couple of opponents. When he ran into Hayes' right-back, a man behind me just said, "Bugger." (It turned out the woman was watching with former Deportivo La Coruña goalkeeper Fabri, who latched onto Deportivo Galicia after joining Fulham in 2018.) There were no more goals, just a penalty appeal that ended in a yellow card for diving and some angry home fans, and 1-1 seemed a fair result.

Orit and I got the Tube back into central London together, now talking about all sorts of things besides football, from how we both went home during lockdown to the US Presidential debate due to start in a few hours. I suggested we meet again, perhaps to watch Clapton Community FC with their popular kit modelled on the flag of the Second Spanish Republic, and we talked about how it strange that we hadn't met before, given the number of our mutual interests and acquaintances. I went home thinking about how many people I've met through football, and how I make friends through it. Gone are the days, thankfully, when I had friends with whom I could only talk about football, or where I had to use football as a way of convincing certain men, usually colleagues, that I wasn't irretrievably weird. My friends who I just see at games, in Norwich or elsewhere, are all people who I can talk to about music or politics, who are anti-Tory even if they're not as left as me. Not all of my closest friends in my wider life are football fans, although I struggle to relate to anyone who outwardly detests it, and I find it best when a shared passion for football comes with shared cultural tastes and political leanings - as I knew it would with Orit, who I'm sure I'll see again, in a gallery or a ground, before too long.