I didn’t expect to be signing up for Millwall TV this week. I certainly didn’t expect to be watching Neil Harris’s first interview as the new Millwall manager 11 weeks after watching Neil Harris’s first interview as the new Cambridge United manager. It felt all the more personal given the social media guy at Millwall is also called Max.
“My focus now, Max,” says Neil, “is to make sure that between now and May we’re the best we can be.” All right mate, I know you’ve left, but you don’t need to tell me directly.
Neil is big on galvanising. “I’m proud to be here. Galvanised, excited, energetic … I know how to galvanise the football club, I’ve done it before … As you can tell I’ve got burning passion … I will galvanise everybody.” You wonder whether everyone in Bermondsey will be covered in a protective layer of zinc if Harris hangs around for longer than the 77 days he had at the Abbey.
7 December 2023, Harris stands on a frosty Abbey Stadium pitch. “I want the connection between the terraces and the pitch.” 21 February 2024, Harris in a Millwall training top. “I’m talking about building that connection between the terraces and the pitch.”
7 December: “I’ve always had a real affinity with Cambridge and a fondness for the place.” 21 February: “I want them to see me on the sidelines leading them as a Millwall person.”
7 December: “‘Not a lot is going to change in the immediate future … I know what success is to the fans here, we’re going to try to build it over a period of time.” I guess it depends on how you define immediate. It all feels a little immediate to me.
“I am still caring,” he says to Millwall Max. Are you, you bastard? If you cared, then you’d have committed yourself to my football team for the rest of your life, tattooed Dion Dublin’s face on your torso and changed your middle name to coconuts – or at the very least stayed until we are safe in League One.
Of course it’s completely unfair to pick on Harris. From all accounts he is one of football’s good guys. And what else is a manager supposed to say at their unveiling? In a way this is the ultimate act of loyalty. The club where he is most admired, their record goalscorer, a successful stint in charge already and a club who looked after him when he was treated for testicular cancer. He’s probably getting paid twice as much to do the same job nearer his house. We’d all take it.
Cambridge United social media – which isn’t exactly 4chan – is disappointed; a litany of snake emojis and capital letters: THERE IS NO LOYALTY IN FOOTBALL ANY MORE. But you wonder when any more began. Fred Everiss managed West Brom from 1902 to 1948 – reckon the players might have found his sessions a little samey by the 40th year? Perhaps he changed his assistants all the time to keep it fresh. Sir Alex Ferguson’s 26 and a half years and Arsène Wenger’s 21 and a half weren’t that long ago. Sometimes managers stay for ages, sometimes they don’t.
Really this is just the ludicrous chasm between the loyalty of a fan and the loyalty of a player or a manager. We want to think of our club as special, as different, we want those who represent us to kiss the badge and we pretend in our minds that they mean it. When a player wins a corner and encourages the crowd by waving his arms in the air we yell like trained monkeys. He really gets it. He knows what we’re going through. It’s the kind of performative nonsense we know isn’t real. But we just want to believe.
I have sometimes wondered whether you could change your football club – show the same loyalty as players and managers. It feels sacrilegious to even type the words. Sure, your love can change over time by proximity and life. It’s harder to get in John’s Fiat Panda and go to Bournemouth away these days. But it’s always there. It becomes part of your subconscious – something so hard to explain to people who don’t care about sport.
If your club did something reprehensible or you got new unpleasant owners, could you pick someone else? Force yourself to go week in week out, until you knew the players, knew the people around you, learned the songs. It is just 11 people you don’t know, and who don’t really care about you, running around.
Science suggests not. In 2016 anthropologists at the University of Oxford discovered that: “Painful losses or big wins can be so intensely felt that they are perceived as ‘self-shaping’ experiences, meaning they become embedded in the psyche of a football fan so that their own personal identity fuses with that of their club.”
Over time, such shared experiences are likely to increase their loyalty to their team, according to a paper published in the scientific journal PLOS One.
Basically we are all in tiny cults all over the country and all over the world, and we should blame whichever family member or friend introduced us to it.
Perhaps the best thing is to pretend loyalty is a real commodity in football and love your long-serving mediocre right-back, and revel in whichever Judas wrongs you next. As the excellent Cambridge United fans podcast Under the Abbey Stand said on their emergency pod on Wednesday, the Neil Harris saga is the kind of thing you love to see happen to other clubs.
I’m not sure the Cambridge ultras would fare well in a war with Millwall’s finest, but with respect to everyone there, and with thanks to the decent, if truncated, job Harris did at the Abbey – boy I hope you lose every game and we’ll see you in League One next year.
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