Salisbury 1 - 1 Oxford

(A glimpse of a way through the woods; snow clinging to the ground.)

Reading photographs: Moments in time

A photograph is a moment in time. From the second it is taken it is history. When we look at these images, we read them with the wisdom that comes with the knowledge of what was to come next.

This moment is in the seconds before kick off for the final game of Oxford's 2008-09 season, against Northwich Victoria. Billy Turley hugs his two daughters closer to him as the noise in the ground builds to its crescendo. One tucks her head into his shoulder to hide, the other looks tentatively towards the London Road in full voice. A moment of privacy as Turley kisses the head of one, but his gaze is already turned towards the site of the very public moments to come. He eyes the goal in which he is soon to concede the first goal of the afternoon, puncturing the pressure that has built over the last six months.

Turley's body attempts to trace a sphere of protection, of reassurance, or of privacy around his daughters as he brings them into this very public arena. One of them looks with trepidation around her: it contrasts with Turley's look of grim determination to ensure there is only one result that afternoon. But our knowledge of what is to come is the knowledge of two goals he conceded, that what was always only ever at our fingertips finally slipped from our grasp, and that his opposite number would oust him from his position in the team.

We dwell on moments such as these as tendrils seem to flow from them; they seem somehow more pregnant than other moments. That sense in your stomach as you watched Turley take his daughters out onto the Minchery Farm pitch was the knowledge that the narrative of a season was more obviously in the balance than perhaps it had been all season. On one side lay everything you wanted: everything Billy Turley wanted too, probably.

On another lay a fourth season in the Conference, and an FA trophy first round game for which 1,663 people would turn up to see Billy Turley finally be allowed to return to the Oxford side: a sole remnant of the days when we were a League club.

[The above picture is courtesy of Steve Daniels/Rage Online, and reproduced here with kind permission.]

Dark night of the soul at Barrow

[Fuego de Noche by Goya, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The sublime followed by the ridiculous at home to Ebbsfleet

Back on the march at Crawley

Ten men in touching distance at home to Barrow

A light gleams an instant at the New Lawn

Winter grind drawing in at home to Barrow

Defeat at Kidderminster played to a stormy backdrop once again

(But clouds pass, and there's always a new day)

Remnants of another time at home to Yeovil in the Cup

(On the outside and looking in, but working on it)

Sammy dans la Stade

"'Don't give a damn, what I wanted was to go in the Metro.'"

- Zazie in the Metro

‘Howcanitstinkso?’ wondered Sammy. The bus doors open and Sammy skipped from the steps onto the pavement. He looked around: nothing was happening. Spotting the fludlites between the towerblock and rooftop, he weeves across the road and into the estate opposite. Here, likewise, there seemed to be nothing happening. A man across the street unloaded shopping bags from his car; Sammy skims round the corner. A path and a bridge across a dribble of a river, and Sammy discovers the objective of his excursion: the stadium rises up in front of him.

Sammy scuffs his heels as he starts to walk round the ground, glancing through the mesh doors and pondering. Unzipping the holdall on his shoulder, he scoops a football out and up into the air, before starting to gently kick it from foot to foot as he ambulls along. Lost in the pleasure of this, he rounds the corner and heads towards the glass eddyfizz before him.

It was then that Sammy noticed the white piece of paper taped above a window in a wall, inscribed in inkjet: ‘OXFORD vs. THURROCK FA CUP EAST STAND TICKETS £12’. The ball dropped to the flaw, and rolled away. Approaching the sign, throat dry with emotion, Sammy stood, re-reading.

His study of the paper was interrupted as a man approached.

‘Alright Sam.’ says the man.
‘Alright.’
‘Back then, are you?’ asks the man. ‘How was Nooport?’
‘(gesture)’
‘There’s a training ball here.’ says the man, bending down to pick up Sam’s football.
‘Znot a training ball, zmine.’ says Sam.
‘You know we’ve got plenty of footballs here.’ Laughs the man.
‘I like having one to kick.’ shrugs Sam.
‘(gesture)’
‘Home cup game then,’ says Sam. ‘when’s the team anownsed?’
‘Already is. Sheet sup.’

Sam grabs his ball, stuffs it in his bag, and barrels into the stadium through the glass doors. Round the corner through the corridor past the office round another corner to the office on the right, flies to a stop in front of the notisbored and the printed sheet. Starting from the top, he reads down, and further down, past the heading ‘Subs’, until his eyes finally alight on ‘Deering, S.’. He stares. And stares. Before finally he turns back the way he came, ball at his feet, playing one-twos with the wall, lost in a daze. Finally back.

A door slams.

‘Nofuckingfootballsinthefuckingcorridors!’

‘Sorryboss’, calls Sammy over his shoulder, feet still attached to the ball, thoughts deflected, passing over cross-field balls and shots from outside the box.

[Picture credits: Top photo cropped from a photo by Jean-Alexis Aufauvre, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons; Images of Sam Deering courtesy of Steve Daniels/Rage Online, and reproduced here with kind permission.]

Oxford 1 - 0 Altrincham

Reading photographs: The geometry of a photo

The emotion of this photo is immediate: Green runs arms outstretched, Creighton bellows defiance, and Oxford's supporters rise as one to acclaim the unlikely. But the photographer's decision to keep the players and the pitch to the bottom third of his photo leaves a geometry to this photo: a plane provides the meeting point for three vectors.

Scattered over the pitch, York defenders have collapsed, defeated, sunk into the background. Mark Creighton has just scored the winning goal late in the game, and leads a line of Oxford players. Danny Bulman and Matt Green follow their own lines to this point. There seems an implicit knowledge of where they are heading, they meet at a point on the plane in front of them. That plane rises in front of them, dwarfing them: the supporters rising from their seats, arms aloft, mouths open mirroring the roar of Creighton.

A plane can be unlimited in its extension: this picture doesn't show whether or where it stops. Vectors, however, meet at a point. The players are individual representatives on the pitch of this bank of supporters, a plane which might continue indefinitely: the discrete part and the whole. In this picture we see the size of the players dwarfed by the supporters, but emotionally there is a mirroring; and geometrically, a union.

[The above photo is © Lewis Outing LRPS CPAGB, and reproduced here with his kind permission. See more of his photography here: http://www.mainlyfax.fotopic.net]

The FA Cup prompts comparisons with this time last year

(A sense of calm prevails)

Reading photographs/Away at York

Posts have been a bit sporadic of late, for which we're sorry; it's not been for want of things to think about at Oxford, more a lack of time. We hope to be back up and running again shortly, but in the meantime, we've been mulling over a new idea.

We were interested to read OUFC's chairman write at some length in the Stevenage programme about a particular photo from the season's opening game. It was, of course, a game that was potent in symbolism, narrative, and ultimately drama, and Kelvin Thomas' words related that photo to what he saw as the club's aims. We were interested that he spent some time talking about an image, which of course has been a core focus of this site, but we also see a burgeoning interest in images and imagery around the club as banners and standards spring up with increasing frequency and imagination, and away games seem to prompt new visual celebrations of our club.

We Are Oxford United has always been interested in these images and symbols, and tried to steer away from photos of what takes place on the pitch. However, we thought we might start publishing a series of occasional posts that look at images of this Oxford side, but try to understand them as symbols rather than simple records of a moment in time. We thought we might as well start with that fantastic image that Kelvin Thomas wrote about - it'll follow next week.

p.s. if you're interested in what we thought of York: it feels strange that our scheduled league games with this club are out of the way already, particularly given how hard and closely fought they've been. Perhaps it's just that, but something tells us that that York side will yet have an important role to play in the eventual outcome of our season.

[Portrait of Man Ray and Salvador Dali, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, LC-USZ62-42535 DLC (b&w film copy neg.), courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons. The image's integrity has been retained.]

Oxford 5 - 0 Grays

(Is it possible to talk at the moment about this Oxford United squad without sounding messianic?)

Barrow away: a distant end and an uncertain road

(Awkward opponents provide a salutary reminder that we have still much to come before we reach the end of the season)

Oxford overcome Crawley at home

('The triumphing of the wicked is short, the joy of the hypocrite is but for a moment.')

[William Blake's illustration of Job 7:14 courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Gateshead 0 - 1 Oxford

Dark clouds shroud the sky at Mansfield

(A first defeat of the season for Oxford; they go down fighting.)

Oxford 4 - 0 Eastbourne

History is quietly cast to one side as Oxford win at the Racecourse

Oxford through the looking glass at home to Luton

(Luton show us how we looked three seasons ago)

[Sir John Tenniel's illustration from Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

After the first half at Ebbsfleet, thoughts drift away...

(...in the direction of Bedfordshire and Wales...)

After the return of the prodigal son

‘I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet’

- Atonement

I’ve been standing at the mouth of the tunnel, feeling the waves of post-match fatigue wash over me, as I look at the penalty area in front of the East Stand. Thinking of goals from the last few weeks; thinking of goals from two years ago.

It’s been a month now, a month of trying to do what I’ve wanted to do for some time. Not to go back to that time two years ago, although I would be a liar if I were to deny I would do it if I could, but to find some kind of atonement for what came after.

The problem for this month has been this: how can a footballer achieve atonement for the past when forgiveness seems to only live in the present, so fleetingly? How many of these moments must there be before there can be atonement? The supporters may forget the past in the moment I score a goal, but can they ever really forgive? As the euphoria dies, is there not a look that tells me they can’t quite give themselves entirely to the moment - not yet - as I once didn’t give myself to them?

Perhaps it was always an impossible task, and perhaps that is precisely the point. The attempt was all. I can give them happiness, but I am not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet.

If I have the power, I would conjure them at a promotion party in April… a spring day at Minchery, milky sunlight slanting across the pitch, the supporters, jubilant in the stands, a sea of yellow as we confirm the championship? It’s not impossible.

(The images of Matt Green in this post are courtesy of Steve Daniels/Rage Online, reproduced here with kind permission.)

A good day for symbolism at Oxford

(We are the 12th man.)

************************
WAOU news: this season's first Occasional Pen Portrait coming shortly.

************************

Creative failure against Forest Green Rovers

A bout of nerves at Kingsmeadow

(Histories collided, and nerves can betray a fear of failure, or indicate the knowledge that something of importance is at stake.)

Planting a marker in the ground at home to Stevenage

Oxford 4 - 0 Chester

(Sometimes it's hard to see much other than the players on the pitch)

Through a glass darkly at Histon

1-1 away at Kettering

(It feels like a solid, old school, reliable sort of result: honours should be even, hands should be shaken)

Opening day at home to York: L'esprit de la saison dernière

(It didn't die that day in April)

Summer, the earth stirs

(This summer the breeze rifles through the leaves of trees; its seeming impatience growing it buffets their branches. The earth stirs from its somnolence with the haste of a child suddenly free to leave his last schoolclass of the day: snatching his bag up, pens fly as he wheels round his chair. Day-dreaming is over: The Season is fast upon us.)

What can we say about Oxford United? Part III: Blogs, the group, and the self

In one sense a blog is simply a piece of webspace where one can store and display various bits of text, images, and sound. Yet a blog invites the use of the first-person narrator, it calls for the expression of feeling, opinion, emotion, in a way that a news site is not. The self is always there; the self is at once the subject and the object. One could then ask of what value is this kind of expression? Is Manuel Castells right when he says that ‘…a significant share of this form of mass self-communication is closer to “electronic autism” than to actual communication.’?

One answer is that to the extent that others identify with this subjective view, there’s value. And in this search for identification and difference, we see a parallel in a football crowd. At any moment one finds people of different backgrounds, different views, different values, and yet what attracts so many people to follow a football club is a sense of unity. Vociferous disagreements are held about the talents of a particular player, the merits of a particular manager, the wisdom of a particular tactic, and yet, for the most part, we can be as one on the terrace. We are the Left Side/We are the Right side: but, We are The London Road.

We Are Oxford United: This title was intended at once to be a claim of possession, but also a nod to this sense of universality. We wanted anyone who follows Oxford United to look at the things we present here, and recognise in them something they know, something they are a part of. Where can this universality come from?

As we talked about in our last post, one important factor is the context in which these games of football we watch take place in. Without supporters, without a league, without desire, you just have 22 men moving a ball round a pitch.

But perhaps the most important piece of context is the past. This is something we saw in what Oxblogger was doing in his favourite posts of ours, the ones we found ourselves identifying with most strongly (such as this, this, this, but especially, this). For the experience of the Oxford United supporter watching the team, as I would guess for all supporters, the past is always present. The players, team, manager, ground, club: they all change, but these are only so many pieces of tracing paper layered over whatever it is that lies at the bottom of this all. It’s this that we glimpse on occasion through these pieces of paper: it portrays a new scene, but visible through it is something we recognise, something we find all-too familiar.

And in the end, that’s what we tried to do last season: to find whatever it is that lies at the bottom of all this. Or not to find it, but to try and allow us, and anyone following this, to glimpse it. Because we’ve become started to realise that what we want to convey can’t be looked at directly, and it can’t be written down. It’s there at the back of your mind: it’s there in the corner of your eye. That’s how we’d like you to look at this blog: subconsciously, with the corner of your eye. If you find that you can see what we’re getting at, then we’ll have managed to say something about Oxford United.

The return of Matt Green

('I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.'

- King James Bible, Luke 15: 18-19)

('The Lost Son' by Max Slevogt, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons.)

What can we say about Oxford United? Part II: Content and context, seeming and meaning

What do we talk about when we talk about football? The ball. A player. A coach. A ground. We could answer the question not just by saying that we talk about a range of subjects, but by saying that we talk about football on a range of levels. In our last post, we wrote about the intense focus of media on matches, the action of football. In that sense, we focus on a single moment of action, or ninety minutes of these continual actions.

On another level we can move back from the action slightly, and take a longer-term view, talking about qualities and their significance for a team or a club’s strategy. The short time of a match, or a period of the match, can mislead our judgement. A player can put in a terrible performance. A manager can stumble upon the right tactic, despite his strategic shortcomings. Talking about a series of matches reduces the role of fortune. Here we see that supporters tend to supply most of the analysis, whether we talk amongst ourselves, write on a message board, or post on a blog. We try to identify the essence of a player or a manager: what we can say holds true of them when the outlying instances of individual pieces of action are taken away, and we can view their performances from a more distanced perspective.

And we can talk about the context in which this action takes place: the surroundings, the supporters, hope, anxiety, and despair. These are subjects can be hard to talk about in a way that feels adequate, and the retreat to stock footballing phrases is all too easy. When so many games are ‘must wins’, when players and supporters are always ‘desperate’ for success, when we’re ‘gutted’ once again following defeat, these words become mundane as we move further and further away from any real awareness of what it was we felt, and why it was we felt so strongly.

But we think they’re perhaps the most important things to say about football, to explain it. The literal truth that football is just 22 men chasing a ball around is belied by this context. The collective emotion of a club provides the meaning to games, provides them with a purpose, explains why we can walk away from a defeat to Leyton Orient shrugging your shoulders and wondering where to go for a drink, and six months later walk away from the same result against the same side with a gnawing canker at the bottom of your stomach that you can't shake.

There is a mysterious alchemy that takes place at a football match.

To understand why football supporters find the game so important, you need to be within this context. There’s a paradox here at its heart: that football becomes overpoweringly meaningful to us because we allow it to; because we choose for it to. It derives its power over us from us. An entirely circular logic, absurd from without but inexorable from within: we could break the spell at any moment, but we don’t.

As the internet has facilitated and fed our need to talk about football, we’ve focused on ever greater minutiae, ever more analysis. It’s always there; there’s always one more opinion to read on whether Adam Murray will fit into Oxford’s midfield next season. And with this, we think two things have also happened. On the one hand, we rarely seem to have found a concurrent means of expression of the context of all this detail beyond our worn phrases, but on the other hand, the intense focus on every facet of Oxford United has created a community where we all share a detailed knowledge about all manner of things related to Oxford. It’s this community of shared knowledge that we think presents an opportunity to talk in a new way about Oxford, in a way that might let us explore not just its seeming, but its context and its meaning.

What can we say about Oxford United? Part I: Football writing and language

What can we say about Oxford United? One response might be: a lot, apparently. Thousands of words are poured out every week by commentators on the activities of this football club in print and on the web. Within minutes of a ‘story’ being reported, you can usually go to three or four other websites that will report the self-same facts, often using pretty much the same words. But when we’re told, on the signing of two new players, that one describes himself as ‘…very energetic, I get up and down the park and I've got a never-say-die attitude.’, and the other contrasts himself as having ‘Lots of energy and a never-say-die attitude.’, what have we learnt here?

To some extent this is a problem with the language of football and football writing. Every skilled left-footed player is ‘cultured’, every struggling manager is in danger of ‘losing the dressing room’, and every striker who shows a propensity for scoring from within the six yard box is ‘a poacher’. Duncan Hamilton eloquently complains about the limited language deployed in the description of football in the first chapter in his book on Brian Clough (even if he then doesn’t live up to this weighty gauntlet he throws down for himself). But for the supporter, in the internet age, looking for this kind of news on Oxford United becomes like a dirty habit – the fix we secure is all too often too weak, and we’re driven back to scrabbling round for more. And that’s before we even start considering message boards.

It’s in this context that we’d like to spend a couple of posts considering what it is possible to say about Oxford United, and what we can say. Forgive the self indulgence. The close season provides a time to step back, and try and take an overview of what has passed before, and what we hope to achieve in the next season. We’ve found ourselves doing just that. We wrote before that this blog had originally intended as a one-season experiment, and had ended up doing things that hadn’t been originally envisaged. One of those things was to try to write in a more creative way, when we’re more used to a ‘critical’ tone. So this will be a brief return to some critical writing.

At the end of the season, we look around and find ourselves as one of a number of blogs on the subject of Oxford United. If we’re seeing the start of a growth of blogs about Oxford United, we think that these thousand electronic flowers should be encouraged to bloom. Blogs are by their nature of the moment, but momentary too. More importantly, we think they allow the potential to say something different, and differently, about Oxford United. The demise of an Oxford United fanzine has left a hole that blogs could fill, but in turn these blogs could open up new possibilities. That's what we'd like to consider over the next couple of weeks.

Last night I dreamt I went to Minchery again

‘We can never go back, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us.’

- Rebecca

Last night I dreamt I went to Minchery again. It seemed to me, as I stood in front of the locked gates to the ground, that I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.

The passage closed around me, cloistering me from the moonlight as it once had the sunlight, the air inside cooler and still. The blotched and stained concrete echoed slightly to my soft steps as I followed the way round to the left, past the shelves now empty of wrappers and bottles. Darkened doorways to booths and toilets and shuttered refreshment bars bore silent witness to my passage. The breeze blocks and sandy cement felt rough to the touch as ever, cold under my fingers. Signs that once guided now seemed to loom over me, their intentions redundant and unclear. I hurried through the shadows toward the pool of moonlight in front of me.

And then I turned to my right, and there was the pitch - our pitch - silent and suggestive as it had always been. A torn square of blue paper, missed by the groundstaff, scuttled past my feet, blown by a sudden breath of wind, and made for the darkened grass.

Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, even upon a dreamer’s fancy. As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that the ground was not empty, but lived and breathed as it had lived before. A slight sigh of wind ruffled the grass, and I saw the forms so familiar to me, in formation to take a free kick from the corner. The wind seemed to collect as a voice that cried out to them. A figure drove the ball low across the box, a foot connected with it, and it flew through a crowd and into the back of the goal. Figures wheeled away, seeming to revel in a sense of invincibility, others rushed to collect the ball, and from the privileged position of the dreamer, I saw the inexorable momentum of inevitable victory, certain as it had been many times before.

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it, and the figures disappeared. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring terraces.

[Some editorialisation that we usually try to avoid too much of:

For this piece we borrowed from our ‘inspiration’ even more so than usual, so if you liked some of that, you can probably be sure it was lifted pretty much straight from Rebecca, and we should make the debt to Daphne du Maurier even more explicit than we usually do for writers we use. It’s the close season: why not read or watch her story? It’s a dark, thrilling, some might even argue modernist, take on the romantic novel. And it seems appropriate to end our coverage for this season on a dark note for a romantic story, because that’s what we just witnessed. There is one more thing we might post here, but to be honest, the ending of the above piece reflects the way we feel right now: those of us who have followed this unlikely story through the season have been robbed of the chance to see if the most romantic of endings might yet have come about.

And the past is too close to us.

So, we’ll see you all at Court Place Farm again in a few months no doubt. The blog was intended as a one-season experiment. What was planned isn’t quite what we ended up doing, but we’ve enjoyed it, and so long as we feel we’re not repeating ourselves, there’ll be more. In the meantime, we’ll be making a few cosmetic changes over the summer, but mainly spending our time hoping to read and see interesting things. If you fancy doing the same and would like some ideas, then anything you’ve read on here and liked over the season was inspired by/pilfered from somewhere – search for the title after the quote at the start of the piece, or follow the links to our sources for the art.]

Pondering self-inflicted defeat at home to Northwich

[Reflections on the season and a couple of other bits we would like to post will follow in the coming weeks.]