#50 - Stade Marien, theatre of despair
Or, on the absurd masochism of supporting a Brussels football team
HAMM:
Have you not had enough?
CLOV:
Yes!
Of what?
HAMM:
Of this... this... thing.
CLOV:
I always had.
Not you?
HAMM (gloomily):
Then there's no reason for it to change.
CLOV:
It may end
- “Endgame”, Samuel Beckett
Squint hard - very hard - and you can convince yourself that Brussels’ Stade Joseph Marien has a touch of the Greco-Roman theatre to it, with its shallow banks of seats cut into the soft limestone slopes of the city’s highest point. The stadium, and Union St Gilloise’s band of players, has been home to a lot of drama these recent weeks, most of it of the tragic farce variety - or farcical tragedy.
The Sunday just gone was no different. For the third successive season, Union has finished at the top of the regular season, putting themselves in prime position to win the round-robin playoffs and the overall league title for the first time since 1935. And for the third successive season the club looks to have collapsed under the weight of all that history and expectation, fumbling their title challenge to the despair of the fans who crowd the Marien every Sunday in blue and yellow. This season, it’s the club’s captain and goalkeeper Anthont Moris, who has donned the mantle of Falstaff, bumbling through a series of major blunders and putting his club’s fans through the horrors. But this Sunday it was young Noah Sadiki who flubbed his lines. A misplaced header in the 18th minute allowed Antwerp’s burly Dutch striker Vincent Janssen to knock the ball past a stranded Moris, sucking all sound and life from the Marien’s watching chorus.
Inevitable failure, total destruction, and the despair of watching another club make off with a trophy that was rightfully ours - those were the overwhelming feelings in the minutes after the goal went in. British dramatist Martin Esslin, in an essay in which he coined the term “theatre of the absurd”, used it to describe a collection of playwrights and plays in which “everything that happens seems to be beyond rational motivation, happening at random or through the demented caprice of an unaccountable idiot fate.”
I’ve not read a better description of what it feels like to see your football team, once able to defeat all comers, is suddenly barely able to string two passes together. It’s what it felt like several weeks previously, when Union were two goals down in eight minutes against lowly Cercle Brugge. When the whistle blew on that game, Union having contrived to lose 2-3 at home to the worst team in the mini-tournament, I texted our Union-centric group chat: “Life Is Pain”. Two weeks later, when Anthony Moris kicked the ball off the backside of a Club Brugge player and it bobbled inexorably into the net beyond the despairing legs of a retreating Union defender, another member of the group reposted the message with a “crying eyes” emoji reaction.
What had we done to deserve this? Why had fate submitted us to this endless cycle of hope and despair, submerging us watching fans into a dream world of nightmares, every Sunday forced to return to the Marien for existential abuse, the reasons for which we have not been informed. For these three years the players appear to be acting out the same script, the plot of which they are unable to deviate from, doomed to repeat the same patterns over and over again. They are like Esslin’s “marionettes, helpless puppets without any will of their own, passively at the mercy of blind fate and meaningless circumstance.'' And nor can we fans stay away, drawn to the Marien every weekend as much in hope that something might change as in tacit understanding that this is the true reality of life, futile and devoid of hope. We were, and are, complicit in our own humiliation.
These were the thoughts that preoccupied my brain in the minutes after Antwerp’s goal, as I tried to console the bereft 10 year old in the seat next to me. I tried to convince myself that if what we were seeing out on the pitch really was a tragedy, then it was a minor one in the longue durée of the club’s topsy-turvy history. But that’s not going to mollify a child who’s crying into her paprika chips, who’s never heard of the Annales school and couldn’t pick Fernand Braudel out of a line-up, and who’d never seen her team lose all season until that disastrous first against Cercle.
And then, from nothing, there was hope. In the faraway goal at the other end of the pitch Union scored a goal. And then another. By the end of the game they’d gotten two more and the chorus had reclaimed its full-throated roar. Maybe this wasn’t an absurdist farce. Maybe we - they - could really disrupt the patterns of the past, escape the doom loop and swerve the machinations of intolerable fate. Maybe this would, finally, be our season.
Maybe that footballing philosopher, Albert Camus, was right when he said “...the point is to live. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart…There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”
We won’t have long to find out. This Sunday at the Marien it’s the Brussels derby. Union versus Anderlecht. Shall we go? Yes, let’s go.
Miscellaneous Notes
You might have noticed the absence of a newsletter last week. Well, I’d half written something but it made so so angry, so depressed, that I couldn’t finish it and had to step away from the newsletter for a week. Normal service resumes today, and a version of that text will come next week.
There will also - finally! - be a new article on Brussels Beer City appearing in the coming days. Keep your eyes peeled.
Also another (food) writing-related announcement coming soon, but I won’t gazump the peope in charge just yet! It’s a good one, though!
No weeky highlights today, that’s for another week. Still playing around with the format, if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see here, or you think isn’t working, let me know!