Here it is, then. Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. Although only, it must be said, when judged against a list of other parts of the year that, deep down, nobody with any sense really likes that much.
You might disagree. But it doesn’t make any difference either way to Christmas, which is upon us once again like a vast, smothering weather front of duty and consumption, gushing in through every crack and open window, the usual gravy-soaked nightmare of ritual and repetition, cajoling acquisitiveness, unfulfilled desire, people hovering in the kitchen trying not to say things, undercut at all times by the distant, mocking impossibility of appearing even a fraction as happy as the people on television.
At which point it is time once again to give thanks for the gift of football. Christmas and football. Football and Christmas. It has always been a brilliant fit, from the early days of league matches on Christmas Day to the current gloriously overstuffed holiday schedule.
In more recent times it is hardly surprising the Premier League should slide so easily into the festive season. A certain kind of tinsel-strewn event glamour has always been a part of the show in a league where it is, let’s face it, pretty much Christmas every day. Talk to the Premier League about Christmas if you like. But it’s already there, way ahead of you pal, swaying against the doorjamb, pockets crammed with custard, Brussels sprouts tumbling from its turn-ups, Santa hat askew, doggedly ignoring the fact it’s still the middle of August.
Perhaps the best bit of Christmas football is the other side of this, the way football’s best parts are clarified and thrown into relief. At a time of year when simply getting out of the house is a major triumph football offers, above all, a beautifully welcome sense of escape.
This year the fixture list has thrown up league football of some kind eight days out of nine from Boxing Day to early January. At least two million journeys – Yeovil to Oxford, Burnley to Bristol, Chelsea to Manchester – will be made across a frost-bound, fog-prone network of road and rail, in the grand tradition of jams, frozen platforms and shuttered city centres, tracing the entrails of a country that nothing else really maps quite like football.
It is no accident that football has wrapped itself around the English Christmas. The two were invented at about the same time, functions of an empowered Victorian worker-class enjoying the new ideas of “leisure” and disposable income. As football was being codified so too was the modern Christmas, with its trees and cards, its godawful dinner. In 1889 the streams finally crossed as Christmas Day football arrived. America has its more famous traditions of noble travellers, the Thanksgiving return, the snowbound planes, trains and automobiles. England has football and Christmas and the annual migration around a fraying industrial landscape.
No wonder so many of football’s component parts take on a distinct festive glaze at this time of year. Even the players seem unusually heroic, running out in their Christmas gloves, like absent dads waving from the train, engaged for now in some noble seasonal labour. Plus nothing is quite so touching, so chill and dank as a football manager at Christmas. The tiny frozen feet of Steve McClaren. Louis van Gaal with his huge, sad drooping head, the head of a wise, lonely moose impaled on a trophy wall in some forgotten lodge. Rémi Garde, collar up against the drizzle, stood on his touchline like a man stranded on a provincial train platform on Christmas Eve, shoes soaked, umbrella blown inside out, maintaining a veneer of mournful self-control when all he really wants to do is hurl his suitcase into the bushes and sit weeping against the vending machine. Have a heart, sir. For the managers at Christmas.
Of course it wouldn’t be Christmas without a little sozzled introspection, a cracker motto to end. If there is a wider sadness about Christmas and football it is the shared sadness of money and waste and an insatiable hunger for more and better and newer. Although not perhaps so much this season.
So far teams who have chopped and changed less and spent a little less, seem to be performing better. Leicester City have been portrayed as something freakish, a pre-Christmas miracle. But one benefit of the new TV money has been that for clubs such as Leicester there is no need to sell. Continuity, well-grooved combinations, a hard-won heart can all be retained.
Leicester’s last starting XI had six players who were there with them in the Championship. Watford have Troy Deeney and Odion Ighalo, still high-kicking down the stage stairs, twanging each other’s bow ties and goofing about with Angela Rippon, making all the right runs and all the right passes, just not necessarily always in the right order.
For Leicester the festive schedule will provide a new challenge. Six games in three weeks is a genuine test of all that brio and vim and unity of purpose. For now they remain the Premier League team you’d most like to discover downstairs dressed in paper hats and reindeer sweaters playing Jenga and blanching the parsnips, perfect seasonal tree-toppers in a league where Christmas is, perhaps unexpectedly, always a source of cheer.
