Football identity to be sniffed at

FROM THE ARCHIVE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS:Wearing the same jersey as your favourite footballer is acceptable but smelling like him is taking it a step too far, says TOM HUMPHRIES

WHEN I was very young and knew no better, I fell in love with a man called Sniffer. He was a footballer. Sniffer was my sun, my moon and my stars. When his groin was strained , I felt sympathetic tweaks myself. When his hamstring was hamstrung I walked the schoolyard with a gallant limp. When Shoot magazine informed me that Sniffer stroked the ball as if it were bone china, I took to performing dangerous and lewd acts with my mother’s gravy boat.

Sniffer played with Leeds United. I presume, because he never found time for me, that he had a wife and family somewhere. If they existed, they hardly knew him as Sniffer. His real name was Allan Clarke and in all likelihood they addressed him by some variant of that rather conventional English sobriquet. Mrs Clarke would hardly kiss her husband’s pale forehead and fondly declare her love for him in football fan terms. “I love you Sniffer, I do. Oh yes, Sniffer I love you.”

Back then, though, I imagined all things were possible in Sniffer’s life. Sniffer wasn’t the most manly of nicknames but a boy who answered to “Humpy” could feel a certain empathy there. “Here comes Humpy” weren’t words to chill childish hearts.

Then, as now, Africa was in trouble. Our class was dragooned into an unlikely scheme by which each of us would adopt an African child or a “black baby”, as the generic term was then. One new penny a week would be collected from each pupil and this would be forwarded to Africa (where exactly? The nun said she had an address) to ensure the upkeep of each adopted child.

Naturally I argued against this smug, First World paternalism, setting the paltry drip of our charity against the monstrous crimes of England’s colonial past. I proceeded to rage against the half-heartedness of western efforts to adjust the balance of trade or to encourage indigenous industry and self-sufficiency . . .

My ideas later formed the basis of the Brandt Report but, shamefully, back then I was bought over by the more novel aspect of the nun’s wheeze. Each of us penny donors was to conjure up a name for our African adoptee. The nuns, with their well documented connections in the christening business, would make the moniker stick.

Such an opportunity doesn’t often fall the way of a seven-year-old. So today, somewhere on the African continent, unless those pennies were sadly wasted, is an Allan “Sniffer” Clarke. Christened such by Humpy, a confused Leeds fan living in Chelsea territory.

Humpy did well actually. Allan S Clarke, was the only one of his community not to have been named Peter Osgood.

The memory of the penny-a-week scheme is all jumbled up with childish needs to emulate footballers and the pressing need to shed the name Humpy before girls became discerning.

An advertisement in a soccer magazine brought it all back this week. After a month of sweating in the oppressive heat of Orlando, the Irish soccer team has launched “Team Spirit for Men. The Fragrance for Champions” – an official licensed product of the FAI, yours for £7.95 sterling, including a classy little football-shaped bottle.

Now, I longed once to have a half-respectable nickname like Sniffer. I wore a white replica shirt with a number eight on the back and when I scored a goal I would raise my right arm and walk slowly away from the scene of my heroic deed, just like Sniffer. I even heaped all manner of confusion and stigma on a child in Africa by naming him after a centre forward. Never, though (I say nevah!), did I yearn to smell like Sniffer. Or any other footballer.

I have been in dressing-rooms, (my calling demands that I hang out with naked sweating men from time to time) and I have sniffed the potions which soccer players apply to themselves. My throat has been rendered dry but fragrant by the smell of Wild Forest, for hours on end having inhaled too deeply half an ozone-layer’s worth of body spray-hits-rippling pecs. Then comes the underarm treatment and the bucket of hair gel. Finally, and most critically, there is the serious slap-it-on-all-over business. Eau de Lad. Parfum de Disco. Chanel Big Number 11.

Why does Team Spirit exist? What exactly is the fragrance of champions? Does it really cost £7.95 to capture that fragrance in a bottle? Do champions not smell like the rest of us? Can soccer scouts literally sniff out new talent?

The cult of the fan is entering a dangerous era. A long-running soccer debate hinges on the fact that English teams (and the Irish international side) change the design of their jerseys every first Friday in order to reap a profit from those for whom the wearing of replica shirts is an act of worship. “It’s very hard on parents with young children,” runs the pious mantra.

In this parish, sympathy and body massages are always on offer to parents with tyrannical children but in the matter of replica jerseys the little tykes are the least alarming aspect of the whole business.

Grown men and grown women feel compelled to invest heavily in identifying with their heroes.

When yet another new Irish jersey is launched next month, not many adult fans will decline to invest, on the basis that it is the same shade of green as all the other jerseys they have bought. Wearing the new jersey is a mark of piety and devotion. It isn’t uncommon on Irish soccer trips to meet fans whose entire travelling wardrobe consists of soccer jerseys. For a lengthy trip they might bring along three Irish jerseys (the white away-strip for evening wear) plus, in many cases, the jersey of their favourite English club and that of their county GAA team.

There is something strangely out of kilter about all this, as if being a fan of a certain assembly of professional footballers is the only way in which another swathe of society can define itself.

In Ireland we are obsessed with the quality of our fandom. Identification with our team transforms us into something more significant than a bedraggled island nation on the fringes of Europe. Sport in general and soccer in particular acts as a mass hallucinogenic for marginalised communities. We don’t just trail after the boys in green, we are the boys in green. That’s why Team Spirit, the fragrance of champions, exists.

Sniffer and I were different though.