Goodison Park

I am not generally a traditionalist. In matters of culture, religion or politics, I am unlikely to tell you things should be like they always were. Even in football, you are unlikely to find me nostalgic for the 4-4-2, the long goal kick or even for the days when you were actually allowed to tackle. With football stadiums though, time to AI generate me in papal robes, because I'm ready to defend the one true, eternal faith and way of life, forever and ever, amen.

A stadium should be in the place the club connects to, not lobbed carelessly next to the nearest motorway. It should be visible from a railway station. It should be bordered by houses not retail parks (or even a car park really, sorry Portman Road), there should be pubs you can leave at 2.45pm and still make kick off. The route to the ground should smell of grilled onions from the burger vans. The supporters going from the stadium should take over the narrow streets as they disperse.

The stadium itself should be idiosyncratic. Stands that look like they were built at different moments, connecting different eras of the club. Features that don't make much sense, maybe a small building that shouldn't really be there. Strange textures - wood, tin, brick and concrete - not just smooth plastic cladding. An intangible sense of the past. An aura.

A couple of seasons ago, I made my first trip to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, to see a Conference League match with Portuguese minnows Pasos de Ferreira. It was all smooth and slick, fancy street food concessions, craft ale bars, conference facilities. From the outside it looked like a shopping mall crossed with a spaceship. Inside we got a light show and disco to introduce every player. It left me cold, just another unpleasant barrage of Late Capitalism. Still better than the bloody London Stadium though.

I want my away days to be unique and to feel specific to a place. So, for me, Goodison Park was always a treat under any circumstances. The sunny wander down from the Merseyrail, following the buzzing crowd through terraced houses, past neighbours nattering and Evertonians heading to the ground, a community unfolding between me and the floodlights in the distance. Rounding the corner to see the iconic St. Luke's Church haphazardly mingling with the stadium footprint. Statues to Dixie Dean and to The Holy Trinity - Alan Ball, Colin Harvey and Howard Kendall.

Inside the ground, the concourse was cramped, grubby and dark, brick, concrete, metal. Up the stairs and out into the light. The dark old guts of a stadium like this make all the colours more intense when you finally surface. Bluer flags, greener grass, brighter sunshine. Up the steps to the entirely ornamental plastic seat you won't use. Right up to the top, your view inevitably obscured by a complex thicket of ironwork holding up the roof. Finding your spot on the wooden floorboards. Someone has stood here feeling things like you feel, every other weekend since 1909. In the absence of a football match that actually mattered, visiting this historic place on a lovely sunny spring day will do me.

Would a proper relegation six-pointer have made it better? Made it feel more real? I would have loved to have seen it on one of those afternoons where the blue half of town pours all its strange, fractious, restive, rebellious port city energy into ensuring that someone else, certainly never Everton, would be descending to the second tier. Neither home team nor home supporters brought their maximum self on Saturday, though perhaps that sort of occasion would have been too much, too intense, too consequential to really enjoy.

Playing the support act as part of our unwanted extended post-season friendly tour had some upsides. The football was played with enough intensity to be watchable, but I wasn’t tearing my hair out at the space Carlos Alcaraz found to cross for the first, nor Alex Palmer’s bizarre footwork for the second. In the away end we went through the motions of teasing the home support and played the hits – “your support is fucking shit”, “football in a library”, “you have to live here, we get to go home” – but without much feeling. It would have been disrespectful not to sing them, frankly, but ultimately all afternoon you felt like (actually quite welcome) guests at a rather joyous wake. It would have been inappropriate to take it too seriously.

For our troubles, we got to enjoy a couple of good goals and a stirring comeback, even if I had to duck down to get a clear view of Omari Hutchinson’s dribble and cross for the equaliser.  There were nice cameos from a few players we won’t see much more of - Enciso, Delap, even a little Kalvin Phillips, as a treat. There were promising performances from some we almost certainly will - I increasingly feel like George Hirst might “do the full Mitrovic” in next season’s Championship. It was not worth lamenting two points that got away nor worth fretting about the continued shade our away performances throw on our home ones. In many games this season I have hated playing the gawking tourist, happy just to be here, but Goodison Park was an exception.

Unique places always are and football stadiums only become unique after they’ve weathered half a century or more. Frankly, I don’t think teams should be allowed to leave their true home. This is a cultural heritage issue. They should just make a list of untouchable places. Is English football better for moving West Ham from Upton Park or knocking down the old White Hart Lane? Tottenham’s stadium is all perfect sight lines and whizz-bang graphic displays but it has nothing on a proper football stadium.

We must have these new places to progress apparently, to “maximise commercial revenue” and “stay competitive” on the pitch. But must we? Bournemouth the football team sit above both West Ham and Tottenham, despite playing in a garden shed. Surely the one actual advantage we might derive from selling out our game to oligarch investment and broadcast money is that we can be left alone with our living museums? From time-to-time people float the idea of bulldozing Portman Road and moving to some purpose built bowl off the A12. You can see the sad husk of Colchester United from the same dual carriageway, living a fate far worse than administration and bankruptcy.

Farewell Goodison Park? No, make them stay forever! I don’t care how much you spent on that thing on the waterfront. There’s still time to knock it down and recycle the building materials. Stay where you belong.