22 July 2026

Bankers can be hooligans too

The football showed me something ugly

Photo by Brook Mitchell / AFP via Getty Images

Last week, I was invited by M— to watch the England-Argentina match at his place. J—, B— and J— would also be going, and as these are my four best friends in Brighton I was looking forward to it. They are all passionate and knowledgeable football fans but two of them support Spurs and one supports Chelsea, so I tend to watch international matches only in their company. I once saw Spurs getting thrashed by Fulham on the screen at the King and Queen in Old Steine, Brighton, with the two Spurs fans, and my feelings were mixed. My main problem was finding it difficult to keep the smirk off my face and express an appropriate level of commiseration – ie, the bare minimum compatible with a basic level of human decency. Why do so many of my friends support Spurs? It is statistically improbable I should have so many. It is as if the universe has a sense of humour, though not a sophisticated one. Why anyone supports Spurs is another good question, but not one covered by the remit of this column. Maybe Hunter Davies could explain.

Anyway, come the day I find myself with a streaming cold and as one of the J—s is recovering from an operation and therefore immunocompromised, I thought it best to stay home and watch it in bed. M— has an enormous telly – though not as big as the King and Queen’s, which is mind-bogglingly huge – but his living room isn’t the largest in the world and my germs would have been sprayed to every corner.

Also, and I am not claiming any clairvoyant powers, I had a bad feeling about the match, which had been affecting my mood all day. I don’t think you have to be psychic to expect England to lose to Argentina but there was something particularly dispiriting about this premonition; perhaps because there was a jarring note of optimism, or hope, in the mix. And then there is the foreknowledge of what the game is going to be like.

“I love the way they play,” said J—, before the match, “with a smile and a gentlemanly manner. Corinthian, almost.” (For those who do not know much about football and yet are still reading this, Argentina do not really play like that. Instead, there is a lot of pushing and shoving, fuelled partly by historical resentment over the Falklands.)

So I stayed in, in bed, surviving on hot toddies and instant noodles. (I still have no fridge.) And it was just as well: it is not fun to be in a room with four other disappointed people, while being disappointed oneself. At least I wasn’t in a pub. I will never forget the time I watched England vs Germany in a pub in Chelsea with a group of friends, including Ralph, who was half-German. In case you’ve forgotten, the game, at 1-1, went to penalties, which Germany won; and Ralph, who had a mischievous sense of humour and an appetite for chaos, said, or rather sang, in a quiet but loud enough voice, “Easy”, or rather “Easee-ey”. You know how time slows down during a car crash? It did now. The pub, which immediately after England’s loss, had been existing in a state of stunned silence, suddenly went mad. Because the pub was in Chelsea, everyone in it apart from me was wealthy, and because it was 1990, everyone in it, apart from me, was on cocaine and booze, the expression their madness took was impressive. I have never seen anything like it, and I’ve been in some pretty rough pubs. For some reason, and I am extremely grateful for this, they never identified Ralph as the source of the offending “Easee-ey”, despite him looking almost comically like a recruiting poster for a certain youth organisation in Germany during the mid-1930s – blond, blue-eyed, ludicrously good-looking.

The mayhem spilled out into the street, and as I said, this was Chelsea, so all the cars outside were German. Even the fact that they were, in all likelihood, owned by the patrons of the pub, they streamed outside to commit retributive violence on them. Mercedes-Benz! Bayerische Motoren Werke! Higher-end Volkswagens! Your boys took one hell of a beating! We slinked out of the pub, with me brooding on the madness of crowds, the strange behaviour of bankers – I presume they didn’t mind too much about destroying their own cars, knowing they’d be able to afford a new one by Tuesday – and the certain knowledge that I would never forget what I had just witnessed. Also, a quiet awe at Ralph’s comic timing. (Unfortunately, he is no longer with us. Illness, rather than an enraged Chelsea hedge-fund manager, claimed him.) I also took to heart the lesson that one does not have to be underprivileged to engage in acts of wanton destruction; and these people were privileged. Even before they ran amok, I had rarely taken against so many people en masse at a sitting. Even Spurs fans after a drubbing by Fulham behave with more decorum.

Anyway, that’s it for the Great Summer of Sport for 2026. There’s a Test series in August and September, and after that, autumn, then darkness and misery, and Arsenal losing the Premership. Maybe the scaffolding will be gone by then; maybe I will have a new fridge. Of course, in the winter, I don’t really need one.