Maccabi Tel Aviv’s sorrowful ban from Aston Villa plunges football into darkness.
By Jonny Gould
A chunk of my background, both personal and professional, has been washed away.
I didn’t think football was supposed to hurt like this.
Banning a mere thousand or less Israeli football fans from Villa Park for a Europa League tie is a cause for deep sorrow.
But not just for me, an Aston Villa fan through my Holocaust-surviving grandfather who setup his typewriter shop bang next to Aston Station on the Lichfield Road, but for this generation of Villa fans and those to come.
Why?
Because football is supposed to be a thrilling, entertaining source of pride; not a dispensary for anger and shame, of imported hate and community breakdown.
Is the Beautiful Game still beautiful?
My generation and those that came before had the best of it. We enjoyed league title wins, European glory and trips to Wembley.
But it would have meant nothing without the communal joy and camaraderie it spawned.
And for this Jewish kid, it was a high voltage plug-in to the prevailing, sometimes overwhelming culture of my city beyond my upbringing.
So, accepting they were of me, that by the age of 21, I was reporting my beloved team from the press box for the radio station covering the West Midlands and Shropshire.
When I returned as a national reporter to the old Trinity Road box years later, the stewards, dear old men, bowled me over with their effusive welcome back. Like that beautiful Archibald Leitch-designed stand, their unvarnished spirit is gone.
So, this is my own very personal sadness about what football and the city that helped shape me has become.
The English game shunned politics, now it’s buried by it.
Snarling Islamist boycotters – an elected MP is trashing what was good here. For what?
They think it’s all over. It is now.
About the writer:
Jonny Gould is a television and radio presenter on Talk and host and producer of Jonny Gould’s Jewish State podcast.
At the end of 2018, he launched a podcast in response to the unchecked and sudden rise of UK antisemitism. In a short time, “Jonny Gould’s Jewish State” (on Apple, Spotify and elsewhere) has grown into both a snapshot and library of the changing temperature for one of the west’s oldest and continuous Jewish communities.
As a board member of the Israel Diaspora Trust, Jonny’s also regularly briefed off-the-record by influencers and decision-makers across the US, Israel and the UK.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
