A Love Letter to Football: From the Terraces to a Transplant and Back Again

By Mark Davies

A Love Letter to Football is the story of how the beautiful game, from the litter-strewn pitches of the grassroots to packed stadiums at the top of the sport, can help carry us through our darkest days.

In 2016, Mark Davies was diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer. A lifelong supporter of Middlesbrough Football Club, his devotion to the club and passion for a game so cherished by billions of people has been essential in helping him navigate the uncertainty of diagnosis and treatment. It' s been a fundamental part of his life in other ways too, from dealing with depression to fatherhood, not to mention some of the trials and tribulations of life' s broader challenges.

This honest, funny and entertaining account of a life-changing experience, love for a football club and the way the game has been a bedrock throughout his life underlines that football may not be more important than life and death, but the joy and ecstasy it can bring – even for a Middlesbrough fan – really can help when times are hard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781801506083

Book preview

Prologue

THE VAST playing fields sit in a corner of south-east London where the towers of Canary Wharf loom up in the distance, while two squat blocks of flats offer residents a bird’s eye view of the dozen or so football pitches below.

It’s just into the afternoon on a bitterly cold winter’s day in early 2022, and the playing fields are almost deserted. Discarded plastic bottles and chip cartons blow across the grass while a man on a quad bike motors from pitch to pitch picking up the debris. A few groups of players, their matches over and done with, banter their way towards the changing rooms, socks round their ankles, flip-flops on their feet. The women in the food hatch are putting up the shutters while a couple of dogs chew on an old football by the car park.

But over on the far side of the playing fields near an avenue of neat suburban semi-detached houses, one game is still being played. Huddles of spectators, hunched up and wrapped up, watch from either side of the pitch as the team in bright green, my son’s, battle the wind, sweeping rain and tough opponents in the final few minutes of a tense and at times bitter encounter.

The months leading up to the game had been bad ones, the very worst. I’d gone from shock to grief to anger, and on occasion sheer bewilderment, and then back through them all again as I tried to come to terms with all life had thrown at me and was still chucking in my direction. Part of it was just the sheer disbelief that all this could really be happening to me. It felt too much like the newspaper stories I used to write as a regional journalist, ‘Devoted dad-of-two faces battle against rare cancer’. Tomorrow’s chip paper; my reality. Even now it often feels unreal, like something happening to someone else. As I walk down the long corridor towards the chemotherapy unit each month there are times when I don’t really connect with the reality that it’s me and my body which is being treated.

I was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. One of the many things it brought into my life was an acute sense of edge. Things which were before at least navigable, or which just passed me by, feel all the more urgent. I can feel anxiety rising up inside me when I think of something I used to take for granted. A day off becomes an opportunity which must be seized. A new project at work can feel as important as the Good Friday Agreement. A dead zone where I can’t get on the web feels like a worldwide conspiracy against me. I’m in a hurry, and so I get anxious, frustrated and perhaps a tad irritable when things don’t quite go my way. I guess it’s an inner pressure telling me to make the most of every day, but not always knowing what that means other than an urge to lap up as much joy as it’s possible to find. And what I’ve found is fairly trite, that the joy of the most precious kind is that found in an unexpected moment. Football can be good at that.

I’d missed a lot of my son Laurie’s games. The rules around the Covid pandemic were relaxing, but I’d been under orders to continue shielding from the world for several weeks – months, really – after coming out of hospital. Despite being outdoors, I was nervous about getting an infection. Covid carries particular risks for people with my condition because of our weakened immune systems and my body was still fragile from being blasted by chemotherapy. So today I place myself on the edge of the group of parents like an unsociable loner. My feet are cold and wet, my hands firmly in the pockets of my coat.

My son, 15 and a half at the time, is standing on the touchline a few yards down from me, jiggling his long legs nervously as he and the other substitutes wait and hope for the coach to give them the nod to join the action. It’s 1-1 and the game is becoming ever more frenetic, the ball being punted up and down the pitch with increasing urgency, the wind holding it in the air briefly before it falls back to the ground and a mass of heads, chests, knees and ankles battle for it below.

Laurie is wearing the bright orange Nike boots he’d found in a charity shop in Bermondsey during a rare trip out in one of the breaks to the lockdowns of 2020. They’d been way too big for him then, but were now just about perfect. He bends down to check his laces for the 12th or 13th time.

The Hillyfielder Hawks, our team, had gone one down early on but drew level in the second half thanks to a wonder goal, the ball hitting the back of the net straight from a corner. The scorer, one of those dour never-stop midfielders every team needs, even broke into a rare smile as he wheeled away in delight. Now, as the game moves into its final quarter, the tension mounts, almost palpable, sucking all involved into a state of mind familiar to all football supporters – the point where the only thing that really matters in that particular moment is right in front of us.

It’s a kind of mindfulness, I suppose, albeit a kind typified not by finding deep inner calm in the moment but by crippling anxiety with only a tinge of hope lurking at the surface. In my experience, only this simple game can do this consistently, whether at Wembley Stadium or on litter-strewn pitches like this: pinning you down, holding you still, dangling the promise of sweet release at some point soon, but warning too that a deadening feeling of gloom could just as easily be heading your way.

We all know it, the possibilities of each extreme, from deadening misery to wild elation, not to mention the unsatisfactory emptiness of the middle ground and a 1-1 draw or something like that. But in the moment, caught up completely in the drama of each phase of play, you put the risks, the fears and the hopes to the back of your mind. And for me, at times like this, that included cancer. Just for these moments, at least.

I look across at Laurie. I started taking him to play football when he was old enough to walk, first to a thing called Little Kickers in a church hall near where we live in south London. I’d sit cross-legged on the shiny wooden floor with the other parents at one end of the room while the children hared up and down the hall, occasionally in pursuit of a ball but more often than not just running for the thrill of it. All these years on I can still see him slipping and sliding towards me, a massive smile on his face, then falling into my lap in a great bundle of energy-laden joy.

When he was about four we moved on to a drop-in football session on a Saturday morning at a local school, where they played British bulldogs, fell to the floor in fake agony to order when the coach shouted ‘Drogba!’ in reference to the brilliant yet apparently extremely fragile former Chelsea striker, and played frantic matches, gradually working out as the years went by that running as one in a massed pack was less effective than finding space in which to call for the ball. ‘Pass!’ Laurie would shout, rolling out the ‘a’ as he’d been taught at school. When none of his fellow players responded, he’d shorten the vowel to inject more urgency, revealing his half-northern heritage.

One week he won the penalty competition held at the end of each session and I celebrated inside as if he’d scored at Wembley, almost unable to contain a surge of childish adrenaline but somehow managing to keep it in. Every Saturday for years he and his brother Alec would strut their stuff on the astroturf, usually in a Middlesbrough kit of some kind, an incongruous sight among the other kids wearing the latest from Barcelona, Arsenal and Manchester United.

Now Laurie had moved on to a team, and like millions of others went to training sessions on Saturdays and played in matches on Sundays, with me trying to find useful words of fatherly advice from the sidelines but mainly driving him around here, there and everywhere, and very often to this place in Mottingham with its little cafe and changing rooms stuck in the middle of the pitches which ran around it.

Eventually the call comes. Laurie is to go on for the final few minutes. ‘Go up front,’ his coach Joe shouts matter-of-factly to my son as he pulls off his black training top and checks his laces again. Normally a left-back, Laurie shoots me a puzzled glance as he kneels down. ‘Come on then,’ Joe shouts again as he strides up the touchline with his arms behind his back and a frown on his face. Laurie stands up, gives me another look, and runs on to the pitch, slapping hands with the lad he is replacing.

I can tell that he’s worried. He’s never played up front before, at least not in an actual match, and this is a big one. If I know anything about my son it’s that he hates to let people down, not least this bunch of boys and their amiable coaches, Joe and his sidekick Jamie. He pushes his long hair away from his forehead and looks across at me again, a look I’ve seen a thousand times, a slight frown on his face. I shout something incoherent about pressing hard on the defenders and getting stuck in. I might have added, displaying the kind of football acumen picked up over decades of watching and playing, that he should run a lot. Quickly, as well. Whatever, it seemed to be enough for him. Maybe that’s the trick with fatherhood: we should give up on searching for the words of wisdom we think might become lodged in the minds of our children and focus on banalities. That’s been my approach, anyway.

When I think back to being Laurie’s age, and watch him trying to navigate it all, I quickly lose any sense of wanting to have my time again. Not only did he and Alec – who is younger by two years and a bit – have to deal with all the usual challenges of growing up, they also had to do it in the Covid pandemic, locked down and fearful, with Donald Trump in charge on one side of the ocean and Boris Johnson on the other. On top of all that, I had been very ill in my 50s, spending my days either prone on the sofa or going back and forth to the hospital, the uncertainty of cancer hanging over all our heads.

I once said to Laurie, around the time he turned 15, that I really did understand how it was to be that age, with all the confusion bubbling away in your mind, the fear of not fitting in and finding friends, the challenge of managing emotions and all that.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t have a pandemic and a sick father to deal with as well.’ And of course he was right and it broke my heart.

The cancer had started to creep menacingly into my bones sometime in 2020, just as the new coronavirus was stalking the whole world. This book is about that, and what happened next, and quite a lot of things which came before cancer shadowed our lives. If that sounds desperately unattractive, as well it might, I hope you will stay with me, because it’s less about the undoubtedly grim situation I’ve found myself in and more about the way a simple but beautiful game so many of us love has helped me through not just this challenge but some of the other less dramatic moments of my life. It’s also about what I think I’ve learned from having cancer, from being a father and from football. Not much to be fair, though ‘play it simple’ looms large.

In that it is a very personal journey. I suspect I am the only person in the world whose principle fascination with football revolves around two youth teams from south-east London and one well-established but under-achieving club from north-east England. At the same time I am just one of billions who follow the game with passion and dedication. And that’s one of the things about football. We all, each and every one of us, even the blasted glory-seekers, bring something so personal to the most universally loved of all the games which distract us, delight us and disappoint us no matter what else is going on in our lives or in the wider world. And at its most glorious, despite all the money and some of the things about the way the game is run which stick in the throat, it can still bring out the best in us, and provide the solidarity and fellowship we need, I believe, to keep us going when times are hard. Something we can share while at the same time something we can find in it all which speaks to our existence as individuals.

A few weeks after I was first in hospital, in the summer of 2021, I noticed one Friday evening that I wasn’t feeling quite right. A quick check of my temperature confirmed my fears and so I did as I had been told to do and called the hospital. The haematology registrar didn’t hesitate. I needed to get myself seen as soon as possible.

About half an hour later, I gingerly made my way past groups of waiting patients and handed the receptionist the piece of paper which informed her she had a cancer patient on her hands. Within a few minutes I was in isolation – in fact one of the nursing staff offices – waiting to be taken to a bed in A&E.

By the next morning, after a sleepless night listening to new patients coming and going – in one case going in the most fundamental way possible, I am sorry to say – I was wheeled up to a ward which was almost deadly quiet but for the man next door asking if he could order in food from Deliveroo while he waited for a blood transfusion.

I’d known for ages that I wouldn’t be able to attend the end-of-season awards event for the Hillyfielders, which was taking place that afternoon. My immune system was slowly rebuilding, or had been, and I’d been told that apart from visiting the hospital twice a week, I was to stay at home. But missing it was one thing: missing it while being pumped full of antibiotics as the medical team tried to help my ailing body fight off an infection was another thing altogether.

At about 3.30 that afternoon, my phone pinged with a message. It was from Lisa, the woman whose son was the team’s goalkeeper and who also did some of the administration. She thought I might like to see the ceremony so had sent me a video. I sat up on my bed, pushing the crinkly hospital bed sheets away and, telling myself how clever I’d been to grab a phone charger in the rush to get to hospital the previous night, pressed play.

On a little stage decked with green and white balloons, the Hillyfielders coaches, Joe and Jamie, are looking towards the area where the squad are sitting. Joe gets things going by calling up all the players to receive a medal, which Jamie puts around each neck to applause and cheers from the parents.

Then they start handing out the special awards. ‘We are now going to move on to the most improved player,’ says Joe. ‘It’s very hard when you’ve got a team that’s stuck with you during the hard times. And obviously they have all improved and grown. It’s very hard to pinpoint one player. but unfortunately we have to, so I am going to pass it on to Jamie to do that.’

There’s some chuckling that Joe has passed the difficult decision on to Jamie. But in truth these two were a team, almost joined at the hip in the way they coaxed, encouraged and supported this group of lads.

‘So the player we think has most improved,’ says Jamie. ‘Well, basically when he first joined the club he was a bit shy, he was in himself. As time has gone on he has grown into a young man, he has improved dramatically on the pitch, his confidence is great to see. His favourite word is calm.’

And then I know. This little kid, this beautiful boy, the bundle who fell into my lap as a toddler kicking the ball in all directions, now a tall and languid young man, still a bit unsure of himself, my boy.

‘So Laurie, where are you mate?’ says Jamie. And now I have to put the phone down on the bed because the tears are streaming down my face and I’m trying to keep it down so that Deliveroo man next to me doesn’t hear, but I’m completely overcome, here in one of my lowest moments, my body fighting some unknown and dangerous infection but at the same time almost exploding with joy.

And there he is on the screen, in those awful baggy jeans but at least he’s remembered to wear his Hillyfielders top, smiling that glorious smile for the camera.

When I’ve managed to compose myself I type Lisa a message, my fingers all clammy and the phone smeared with tears, to thank her.

‘Laurie really deserved that. Glad we put a smile on your face,’ she texts back.

She cannot know how much it meant to me, and of course it’s more than football, it’s the kindness and friendship of good people, but as I sat in that bed, overcome with joy, it was football I had to thank for lifting me out of fear and uncertainty and into what I can only describe as a feeling of complete bliss.

Maybe it’s because the greatest of games takes with it so many millions of us that it has a special power to highlight that for all the bad things all around us, most people are fundamentally good. That the things which really keep us going are at heart about kindness, and that for every power-hungry maniac in football there are a million good souls like Lisa. And no matter how puffed-up some of the overlords of the game become, loads of those good souls put a lot of their love into the bonds that football brings. And that even if those in charge of our game eventually manage to self-destruct in their joyless pursuit of yet more glittering prizes, football would live on, because it has a collective strength far greater than those who rule over it. They could take away something of it, of course, but never its soul. For every world-superstar-elite-league there will always be so many more patches of grass playing out dramas just as tense and emotional, if not sometimes more so, than at the top of the game.

The video I received that day was not the only time that Hillyfielders was there for us, providing shelter and space from the storms raging around us and somehow helping us to navigate the uncertain journey we find ourselves on. We were lucky, of course, to land among people like Lisa, Joe and Jamie, the special sort of people that football throws up, the ones who say the right things and also really mean them. But their kindness was by no means the exception in what we casually call the football family, perhaps not appreciating just how much the phrase can be true. My other son’s club, Tulse Hill Juniors, stepped up too. And so did Middlesbrough, the club I have loved since I was six and will for ever more.

Back on the pitch, Laurie is getting himself going, charging around, putting pressure on defenders, tracking back, occasionally looking over for reassurance. There are only about ten minutes left. A draw is looking like the most likely outcome.

1

Not all doom and gloom?

THE TINY office was in a warren of corridors on the ground floor of King’s College Hospital in south London. I was sitting on a plastic chair wedged behind the door next to the haematology consultant’s desk. What little light there was filling the room came from the grey dusk of a dull autumn day outside. It was January 2016.

I know King’s very well. Both our sons were born there, and we’ve visited the A&E department together dozens of times, generally as a result of the kind of minor mishaps familiar to most parents: a few stitches here, a bandage there. There have been a couple of surgeries too. And there was one time when life truly went on hold, everything stopping one agonising evening when Laurie was just two and had an extreme allergic reaction to a Brazil nut. Blue-lighted to the hospital, his body covered in angry red hives, I can still see him looking at me, his face full of confusion and fear. A few hours later we were heading home, our panic quelled by the swift and calm action of the medics. That was one of those evenings when the day-to-day trivialities of our existence suddenly come into very sharp focus. It underlined a point of great good fortune in our lives: if you must have a hospital in your life, you could do a lot worse than happen to live near King’s.

A few months before my latest visit I’d had a heart scare, something not quite right on a scan leading to a load of checks. In the end it was nothing to worry about, and as I sat in haematology and waited to be called for my appointment I was expecting the same. The tests of the last few weeks had been worryingly thorough, but I was trying to see them as a necessary irritation caused by my GP’s extreme caution. Otherwise it was a chance to visit the nice little cafe by Denmark Hill station. The haematology department could hardly ignore the requests they’d received, I reasoned, and I’d already seen a kindly consultant who’d reassured me it was very unlikely this would amount to anything serious, especially given how young I was. I was 48 and didn’t feel young, so that made me feel pretty good. I was confident that this was just a case of going through the motions. There were protocols for this kind of thing, I said to myself, and quite right too. The efficiency was admirable. It was annoying that I’d had to sit for so long in the waiting room, crammed in on the squishy red seats without a wifi connection, and so instead reading an old copy of Marie Claire, but I’d soon be on my way, scooting across the road with my head in my phone, either scrolling through Twitter or trying to make my work inbox a bit more manageable as we headed towards the end of the week.

I was the youngest person waiting, by some distance. The receptionist called me over to ask if I had a ‘line in’. I had no idea what she meant, but rather than pursue the point I just said no, I didn’t think I did. I know now that it referred to a tiny tube threaded through the body to the vicinity of the heart, which makes it easier to get blood samples.

As I waited I remembered another test I’d had, way back in 1982. That was a distraction, too, a medical check-up at school. We’d all lined up outside the main hall which formed the focal point of our 1960s-built comprehensive with its flat-roofed house blocks and leaking ceilings and waited for our names to be called. Once it was, the boys were told to go behind a curtain where a doctor was waiting to tell us to drop our trousers and underpants. He then held our testicles and told us to cough. There may have been more to it, but the testicles part of it sticks in the mind, unsurprisingly. I know there was some reason for it but it escapes me, and I’m not sure it’s a thing any more. I’ve thought about Googling it but I’d be worried about the effect on the algorithm.

I’d dreaded this day for weeks. Distractions back then were not as easy to find as they are today; no option available to idle away some time by watching Middlesbrough highlights on a pocket computer, or