Tongue Over Fist at Bramall Lane

Winning a semi-final gives you something better than a trophy: permission to hope. Having fallen just short of the final two in consecutive major tournaments, England deserved a shot at the Euro 2022 decider at Wembley. But when the Lionesses got it with a 4-0 win against Sweden, Bramall Lane felt nothing like relief. Forty years after the FA ban on women’s football was lifted, England had a trophy in sight for the first time. The explosive, euphoric celebrations were something completely new. 

I was happy to be reminded of that night at an open mic in Leeds a few weeks ago. When different people from random walks of life share a stage, you don’t know what you’ll get. One minute, you’re getting insight into a man’s experience of smoking a cigarette, the next you’re whistling along to a nonsense poem about wind. 

Keith Fenton was one of the last to perform. A striking presence, with a big beard and a deep, booming South London accent — if I drew you a venn diagram of blokes and poets, Keith might just be one of the only people standing right in the middle. 

I was intrigued by Keith and his poem about the semi-final, Two Lads Kiss Outside A Sheffield Pub, because both the poem and its author capture the cultural shift the Euros brought about [you can read his poem at the bottom of this page]. In November, I spent three hours chatting all things footie with Keith over bacon sandwiches at a greasy spoon on Kirkstall Road, Leeds.

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The start of Keith's love affair with football is a common tale. He learned it on the playground, played it in the park on the estate, got picked last for the school team and only stopped playing in net when he realised he wasn’t getting any taller. And like many little boys, Keith was an obsessive who would pore over his brother’s record of every Football League and FA Cup result since 1870. 

Keith knew football inside and out, but if he imagined football held no surprises, the Euros were to show him another side of the beautiful game. After full time at Bramall Lane, Keith was standing outside The Cricketers Arms, an old boozer in the shadow of Sheffield United’s historic home ground, as crowds exited the stadium, buzzing from the Lionesses’ victory. 

There was such joy outside, at the back of the Bramall Lane side of the ground. There were other people who were drinking in the Cricketers who’d come out for a fag. There was a lot of amusement from them. They were like, 'Oh lasses’ football, eh?' They’re not used to it.

The last time I'd been for men's football, they were running battles in the streets. Pompey and Sheffield, you know, they’ve got a bit of history and it was people getting their heads kicked in. That’s what it was like. 

And then I saw those two lads I was talking about [in the poem], I didn't know they were gay when I first saw them, because they were just running down the road with their arms around each other. Even when they first kissed each other, I didn't know they were a couple because straight guys, they get over excited, you might get a kiss.

But then there were tongues and I went, 'Oh, right.'

Football can make you feel like that. Sporting moments are a fast route to a kind of love and energy that is hard to come by elsewhere. Nothing provokes hysterical delirium quite like a few balls in nets. After those four goals in Sheffield, I had to spend a good 20 minutes calming down on a bench in Millennium Square before I was fit to drive back up the M1. 

Our national sport fills everyone with beans, but historically the list of mandated modes of expression has been limited: shouting, singing, fist-pumping, ‘limbs’, a little post-match rough and tumble. What about all the people that want to jump and dance? Scream, cry, wear tinsel-trimmed cowboy hats? How about those among us who’d like to celebrate with a spot of tonsil tennis? 

Snogs and sparkles are welcome in women’s football, but so are the old crowd, too. When I saw Arsenal women play Chelsea at the Emirates on Sunday, there were old boys with binoculars and beardy-weirdy Gooner diehards. You don’t wear a hideous half-and-half shirt, a vintage number stitched down the middle to a 23/24 away kit, if it’s your first trip to N5, but Katie McCabe had got him out of bed that morning despite her Premier League counterparts’ disappointing defeat to Aston Villa the day before.

Yes, some people do both. Before the Lionesses’ semi-final kicked off, Keith got chatting to a couple on the concourse who love going to watch the lads play football, as well. It’s hard though, as one of them is a wheelchair user, and they’re constantly asking people to move out of the way, whereas that night at Bramall Lane, people were pro-actively making space for her to get through.

People seem attuned to each other, like community, properly.

In the men's game, of course there's a community — it's a very communal activity to go to the football, but it's one particular community. Are you in that community? Great, you're on our side. If you're not in that community, you're treated as either not welcome or peripheral: ‘You can go over there if you want, yeah’. 

And that was an eye-opener for me. I hadn't been to women's football before properly, and I began to realise how important it was.

The ‘them and us’ mentality is crucial to sport. There’s no competition without opposing sides. You’ve got the blue team and the red team, or the white team and the green team, and there’s nothing in between. For as long as football has been played in this country, allegiance has been a matter of the heart too often told through fisticuffs.

Colours weren’t so inflammatory when Keith went to watch a Euro 2022 Group C game down in Sheffield, where the walk from the fan zone to the stadium wasn’t an opportunity for hostility, but union – and the experience didn’t suffer for it. 

I followed them all, the Dutch and the Swedes, very colourful, shirts and all that, they were all together just going down to the stadium and I thought… It just wouldn't happen if this was an England game, or even if this was a game in England — they'd be going on a different thing, if it was a men's game, they'd be on a different procession.

But they're all together, slapping each other on the back, having a good time. They go to the game, they support their own team, really vehemently. There's absolutely no bad feeling at the end when one of them hasn't got the result they wanted. There's no animosity, because there doesn't have to be.

I grew up thinking there has to be animosity, otherwise you can't enjoy it. We'd even sit in the pub, ‘Oh it's got to be that needle, if there ain't that needle, it's not football, is it?’ But it is. It's brilliant.

Keith had been going to games for decades, but this one was different and he wanted to write a poem about it. Poems are tough. The bigger the subject, the tougher the task. How do you sum up the joy, the surprise, the weight of history, the excitement of the Lionesses reaching the Euros final? How do you capture a moment when everything is changing?

Standing outside The Cricketers' Arms, which has served up pints to sports fans since the 1800s, Keith was inspired by those two boys’ spontaneous act.

There's an image! They're not women. They're lads!

For all I know, they go to men's games as well. I don't know. But I bet if they do, they don't do that [snog]. They may do. If they do, they’re awfully brave. 

But they didn't need to be brave [at Bramall Lane]. They knew that everyone around would be cool about it, apart from the old fuckers next to me who were having their fags going, ‘oh, bloody hell.’ 

Nothing was said exactly but it was kind of, ‘you think there's a problem with that, don't you?’ And I suppose with the way you were brought up, and that's inevitable, I guess. But the world's changing, mate, and this is it, that's the world changing.

You should be pleased that the world isn't gonna be as dank and grey as it was for you. It's gonna be like that.

TWO LADS KISS OUTSIDE A SHEFFIELD PUB by Keith Fenton

and before they puckered up, they ran
the length of Bramall Lane tubbily
slubbing their England shirts, breathless, joyous...

the long weight of history,
they think it's the national game...
it is now. 1921 - “the game of football is
quite unsuitable for females and ought
not to be encouraged” - that was then

the moustachioed men who spoke
those words from deep in tailcoats,
not fit to lace their boots, and when
those words came home to roost,
interest was payable.

The flag is still St George, the anthem that
same turgid dirge, but now the fans are
the people, not just some of the people,
right now with justice in freefall,
this is what we needed.

And that kiss... clumsy, happy, these are
not tongues of promises, of performative
Adonises, the long lap of luxury in the city
apartment to come; they will lumber home

down ginnels where cats squeal, relive
that backheel from Alessia Russo, ah,
the blessings on those feet, how many lads
have since tried it without success in the street?

What happens next is theirs, their little
skirmish of a kiss was ours.

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