It reminded me a little of that wonderful Christmas Day truce in the first world war, when the two sides briefly came together, put aside their homicidal enmities and played a game of football and sang carols.
The venue was the Riverside Stadium in Middlesbrough, fittingly on Good Friday. Boro, then second in the Championship, were hosting my team, Millwall, third in the Championship. The end of the season was nearing. The tension was acute and pressing and unrelenting. Whoever won would be in pole position for automatic promotion to the Premier League. Not an empty seat in the ground, Millwall too having sold out their allocation of 2,100 tickets. A frenetic, hostile atmosphere, the sets of supporters howling their abuse at the other side. A Manichean divide – unbridgeable, surely?
And then, halfway through the second half, a song came up from the Millwall supporters, bellowed out across the pitch. And incredibly, it was taken up by Boro’s hard-core ‘Red Faction’ and then spread all around the stadium until everyone was singing the same four words, over and over again. Antipathy put aside, a moment of peace, unity and agreement: ‘Keir Starmer’s a wan-ker, Keir Starmer’s a wan-ker,’ they all sang together, the game momentarily forgotten. What a beautiful and moving experience.
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