Gary Neville and the Meaning of a Life

 

Gary Neville’s first England cap coincided with John Major’s “put up or shut up” Rose Garden challenge to his party critics early in the blistering summer of ’95. I was a young man myself then, flatsharing in central London with friends. It was the fiftieth anniversary of VE-Day, the economy was lifting, and as the veterans marched through Knightsbridge, it was as though I could feel the burden of all the long British years of national decline lift, quietly, and carry away.  

For some of us, the cohort of young footballers of whom Gary Neville was a minor but not inconsiderable member were part of that mental reorientation. Just as a good year for new writing or music can lift the spirit, so too can sporting optimism. Scholes, Beckham, Fowler, the Neville brothers, McManaman, Barmby, Andy Cole and, still only rumours from youth teams, Gerrard, Owen, Ashley Cole and Emile Heskey were not just better than we’d become accustomed to since the retirements of the ’66 cohort: they were better than many other major countries were producing. 

Since Northern Rock, of course, they look, like so much else, like the sunlit furniture of a lost preWar world. And anyway, bad luck with injuries meant that that generation’s England played every tournament with their best men missing or muted. I feel about this, as I feel about many aspects of the last two decades, wistfulness, and a sense of lost opportunity. 

But since Gary Neville has just retired after 18 years of professional football, and as he is generally recognized as having had a fine career, it’s surely worth asking what it all meant. It’s an easy question to answer of the career of a politician, perhaps easy too in the case of artists. What about sport? 

Because 18 years is enough for most people. Shakespeare’s writing career only spans 21. 17 years separate the release of the first Beatles LP and the assassination of John Lennon (astonishing, isn’t it, and an outstanding rebuttal to the claim that they were slower, simpler times). Philip Larkin’s first mature collection, The Less Deceived, and his valedictory High Windows were published 19 years apart. 

It’s even true of Elgar, who, in the same time it took Neville to accumulate 85 caps wrote Gerontius, the Cello Concerto, Pomp and Circumstance, the Enigma Variations and Cockaigne, to name only the most famous pieces of his great period. And you’ve heard of Elgar; you’ve heard of Larkin and Lennon; you’ve probably even heard of Shakespeare, but I’m working on the basis that you might not have heard of Neville, and, if you have, you might not particularly care.  

Because although football spread around the world faster than music and faster than cigarettes, it remained sui generis throughout: there was and has been little spillover into everyday life. The enthusiasm of a vociferous minority, my vociferous minority, whilst real enough, is not enough to gainsay the larger number who go happily right through life without paying football any attention at all.  

This is despite the fact that there are almost certainly many more football fans in the UK than people who read serious novels or build classical record collections. To me, this gives the careers of great footballers the air of trapped flies, beating at the window, unable to escape their context. Only rarely are sportsmen so charismatic that they can get out into the more general consciousness. You will know Brian Clough and Muhammed Ali – but for the same reasons that they came to know each other: as speakers and communicators.  

So I wonder if it isn’t all just about immediacy: preserved, transmitted immediacy. Emotion drove me to hide under a table in the latter stages of England v Argentina in 1998. Watching the match on video inspires nothing like the same feelings: a surge inside when Campbell scores late on, of course, and the hope that the referee will give the goal this time.. but the rest is a vague, aesthetic, reflective sensation. I feel the same quietening and distance when reading about the performances of David Garrick or Jenny Lind. An entire life can be full of the achievement of the best, most worthwhile things and yet be eternally, unreachably spent.  

But David Garrick and Jenny Lind were born before film and sound recording. Sir Alec Guinness and Dame Joan Sutherland were more fortunate – no one personifies more, than Guinness did as Smiley, the fullest sense of what I felt lift away in summer 1995. “Personifies” – film and sound recording bring that into the present tense. It’s striking that Gary Neville’s 18 years are on film almost in full and yet at the end of it he’s still in the attic with Garrick and Lind, a shoebox of archive and memoir. It didn’t take death, or the passage of time, to strip most of the original experience and meaning from watching Neville’s matches. It just took the final whistle. That’s all. 

I have sat up with my turntable and my headphones long into the night time and again playing myself the same passages of Handel, Elgar, Schubert, Mozart, Tschaikovsky and Rachmaninov, and although I’ll know every note of every passage, always there’ll be the shock of unexpected freshness, the abrupt emotional gearchange, the break in the passage of time and the exhaustion by dawn. Then, Philip Larkin repeating lines in my head as I run an accusing razor over my face in the flat guilty morning: age, and then the only end of age.. 

And all of my 4 a.m. feeling and experience will be unsearched-out, involuntary. If you want to give Neville’s career its due, there’s a whole series of obligatory arbitrary agreements to be made: that football matters, that the perspective “inside” football matters, that the collecting of medals somehow creates something of enduring value and worthy of celebration for itself.  

Those are the agreements, and most people don’t consent to them. And we’re left with three things. Artists, writers and composers who can induce immediate experience in us, for all that they were quite different people from ourselves. Ordinary people from the past, whose lives and experiences can move us still because we can reach them through sympathy and imagination. And football, which, despite being a hugely important entertainment industry, despite enjoying the benefit of sound recording and film, is still sui generis, still beating on the window like a trapped fly, stripped of its meaning as soon as it’s over, repeating and repeating, and utterly incapable of projecting meaning and emotion even six weeks into the future.  

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see.

(Philip Larkin The Old Fools

James Hamilton blogs at More Than Mind Games.
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5 thoughts on “Gary Neville and the Meaning of a Life

  1. Worm
    July 27, 2011 at 14:15

    I think it touching that after 18 years of top flight football, Gary Neville is predominantly known for having a dad called Neville.

  2. Gaw
    July 27, 2011 at 17:46

    I still get a lift when Gareth Edwards accelerates onto the ball to score in the famous Baa-baas vs All Blacks game. And that’s after what must be dozens of viewings. That sequence will surely be watched – and will thrill – for as long as the oval ball game is played. More proof that it really is a more noble game than its round ball sibling?

  3. andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
    July 27, 2011 at 20:19

    stripped of its meaning as soon as it’s over, repeating and repeating, and utterly incapable of projecting meaning and emotion even six weeks into the future.

    Brilliant, and way better than anything Simon Barnes has written in the meta-sport line. I might even send him this with a ‘read it and weep’.

    When it comes to existential crisis and sport, however, I would suggest that footballers have it better than, say, snooker players or golfers: the meaninglessness is constantly staring them in the face, isn’t it? (Whereas cricket is very comfortable with the human condition…).

  4. richard.lilley@thompsonlilley.co.uk'
    richard
    July 27, 2011 at 21:51

    Marvellous – the dabbler always somehow makes my day. Personally I have fond memories of some documentary showing Gary and Beckham sharing a preposterous Cheadle Hulme mansion bitd: touching in its innocent ignorant (they are incompetently boiling pasta in an impossibly expensive kitchen) proper brilliant unpretentious boyishness – a special quality of sportsmen: that liberation by physical ability from even consideration of the dilemmas that us mere mortals are made clumsy by.

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