The programme seller was there as usual on the corner of Worrall Street and Mercian Way. The same spot where a programme seller has stood for the 45 years I’ve been going to Edgeley Park.
You pay your £3.50 by card these days and he smiled as I held mine out. ‘The machine’s being a bit slow,’ he said. ‘I think it’s got a hangover from Christmas Day.’ It took a few beats before it offered up its green tick.
It was comforting to know there are still some Boxing Day football traditions the Premier League and Sky cannot ruin; everything about the sell-out fixture between Stockport County and Lincoln City felt like a celebration of the heritage of the game.
The decimation of this year’s Boxing Day Premier League fixture list by the Premier League and Sky is an act of cultural vandalism that should never have been allowed to happen, but it did at least serve a purpose.
It reminded everyone of quite how much scorn the authorities and some broadcasters hold for ordinary supporters, in this case those of England’s top-flight teams, and it may have encouraged other fans to visit Football League games and experience the connection that still exists between communities and their teams lower down the divisions.
Before kick-off, some of the chat was about the chaotic first day of the Fourth Test in Australia. The Boxing Day Test, it’s called. Good job the Premier League aren’t anywhere near that. They’d soon have it rescheduled to start on the 27th or the 28th. Tradition is bunk, right?
Oliver Holt was at his club Stockport County’s 2-1 defeat by Lincoln City on Boxing Day
Boxing Day games are one of English football’s great traditions but the Premier League and Sky show little respect for them
It was a sell-out crowd at Edgeley Park. The absence of top-flight games probably didn’t do the attendance any harm but Stockport are a club in rude health at the moment and this was a top-of-the-table clash.
The legendary former ITV commentator John Helm was in the press box, working for Lincoln, and he pointed me in the direction of an item in the Stockport programme, entitled ‘My Favourite Boxing Day Game’.
The game in question was Stockport 3 Wolves 2 from 1999 and the writer remembered it for the fact Stockport’s Ian Thomas-Moore got stuck in holiday traffic on the way to the game, arrived at half-time having been included among the substitutes, scored with his first touch and then got an injury-time winner.
There were no glories like that for Stockport on Friday. This time, Lincoln grabbed a late penalty winner. When the final whistle went, the ritual was over. The crowd spilled into the dark streets, back to brave the in-laws, back to tackle the leftovers.
A few miles to the north, Manchester United and Newcastle were getting ready for the only top-flight match of Boxing Day, a lower number than any time in 43 years. For those who value tradition and points of difference, it was a sad day for our game.
There is much to be admired about Sky’s projection of football in this country. The match coverage is outstanding. It always has been. The match analysis is outstanding, too. It always has been. Monday Night Football is consistently must-watch broadcasting.
There is no one on television I would rather watch dissecting a game than Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher. There is no better polemicist than Roy Keane. David Jones is a master of his craft, who holds it all together. He stops the coverage turning into the grisly festival of banter others allow.
But there is a price to pay for all of that. There is a cost. And the cost is getting heavier with every season that passes. Because Sky are tearing and tearing at the fabric of our game and getting more and more bold and more and more destructive and more and more cavalier in their taste for demolition.
Manchester United’s 1-0 win over Newcastle was the only Boxing Day match in the Premier League; it used to be 10 games until recently
The disdain for matchgoing supporters, who love the tradition, is clear for all to see
Soon the Premier League will have corporatised itself entirely; at least the lower leagues hold onto more of their traditions
The demolition has happened in stages, starting with the move away from Saturday 3pm kick-offs until we have reached a point where Saturday at 3pm often seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the Premier League. Match-going fans have always been close to the bottom of Sky’s food chain. They are treated with contempt.
Sky are also the primary evangelists in the unrelenting attempt to persuade younger viewers that English football began in 1992, when Sky started to broadcast the game. Nothing before then matters. Sky rebuilt football in their image, a shiny, bastardised view of football, where no one ever played on mud pitches or rode murderous tackles.
In Skyland, there were no great goalscorers before 1992. In Skyland, the only record that matters is the Premier League goals record. If you were to suggest Jimmy Greaves is the man to beat, not Alan Shearer, it would remind everyone there was football out there before Sky got involved in it and anointed 1992 as the top flight’s Year Zero.
So now, between them, the Premier League and Sky have desecrated the Boxing Day fixture list. Their disdain for the match-going supporter, in fact, was so brazen it was almost funny. Not content with wiping out one of the great traditions of our sport, the game at Old Trafford was given an 8pm kick-off, making it as difficult as possible for the travelling fans from the north-east to attend.
One top-flight game on Boxing Day? When others look back, in the future, at how football was allowed to be ripped from the grasp of supporters, this will be one of the landmark days, one of the times where people say: ‘Why did no one try to stop this? Why did no one protest?’
In the great gold rush of greed, our game is being homogenised and stripped of the character and the beautiful idiosyncrasies that made it so attractive to television moguls in the first place.
Soon, everything will have been corporatized and sanitised and commodified. Soon, our game will have no traditions left. Or, at least, none that predate 1992.
