The Silence of the Stands: Finding the Joy in Football's Lost Season

by Daniel Gray

'Powerful and poignant' Henry Winter

'Empathetic and poignant … the game's answer to A Journal of the Plague Year ' Harry Pearson

'The Durham City midfielder wore the resigned look of a man trying to find a jar of harissa in Farmfoods. Up front for Jarrow, a centre-forward darted around frenetically, as if chasing a kite during a hurricane...'

When football disappeared in March 2020, writer and broadcaster Daniel Gray used its absence to reflect on everything the game meant to him. That bred a pledge: whenever and wherever fans were allowed to return, he would be there.

The Silence of the Stands is the result of that pledge: a joyous travelogue documenting a precarious season, in which behind-closed-doors matches and travel restrictions combined to make trips to Kendal and Workington seem impossibly exotic. Offering a poignant peek at a surreal age and a slab of social history from the two-metre-distanced tea bar queue, this is the moving, heartfelt and surprisingly uplifting story of a unique season that no one wishes to repeat.

Genres: Football, Nonfiction, Sports

176 pages, Paperback

Published January 10, 2023

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

thanks to the publisher and netgalley for a free copy in return for an open and honest review

This is a mixture of travelogue and the authors love of travelling around football grounds during the period of the COVID in between lockdowns and restrictions and an added touch of cultural history as well, this is an easy going read to follow.

[Kid Ferrous · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniel Gray’s “The Silence of the Stands” is a funny, heartwarming and timely tale about the postponement of British football in March 2020 due to the national lockdown, and how he travelled the length and breadth of the country to find the few matches that were allowed to be played later in the summer.
Chock full of vivid imagery and earthy, hilarious similes, the descriptions of the football matches themselves and the spectators’ banter are heartwarming and funny. However, the levity of the book is tempered by all-too-familiar depictions of the effects of the pandemic on Northern towns and cities. Daniel Gray also brings the locations’ quirks and the idiosyncratic charms of their railways stations to joyous life, and offers potted histories of the clubs and their famous alumni.
Daniel Gray skilfully evokes the ritual and excitement of going to a football match, even in such a restricted form. “The Silence of the Stands” is heartily recommended for footie fans and academics looking for a solid social history of the sport (and, indeed, the U.K. itself) during the pandemic.

[A.J. Sefton · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the weirdness of the upside world of the Covid-19 pandemic and the bizarre lives within lockdown, some things were allowed to go ahead, but not as we knew it. Elite football was one of those things - a tiny fragment of our old lives that we grasped as best we could. Only, it wasn't the same. There were no crowds and no interviews. Instead we heard the players call to each other, the coaching staff giving directions, mutterings, cursings. To make it a tad more real, the television companies dubbed a false sound of football crowds over the recordings. We were grateful. Eventually, lower league teams were allowed to have a limited number of fans attend in very monitored situations as everyone tried to navigate around the virus and government precautions.

​This book is about that strange time. The author and broadcaster Daniel Gray decided that he would visit every ground that let him in. Like many of us, football had been an essential part of his life but it was nothing compared to the health risks surrounding Covid-19. So he adapted to this new version with gusto and recorded his match-going, showing how travel restrictions, masks and safe distancing impacted everything.

It is written in part like a fun novel with each chapter covering a different game, with flashbacks to his youth and reminiscences. In other parts it is a social history of the footballing world and Gray includes a bibliography in respect of this. Focused in the north of England, there are interesting biographical facts about the football managers Don Revie and Brian Clough who both hailed from that area.

This is a fun book that records a very personal experience but also marks a time in history. In an attempt to be witty and to keep the situation as light as possible, there are numerous outlandish metaphors that are distracting, but otherwise the book flows well. As the tagline reads: "Finding the joy in football's lost season" Gray achieves this. Good on him for doing so, for going to the matches he could and for recording it here for posterity. Here's hoping he never has to do it again.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always this review also appears on my blog at: https://livemanylives.wordpress.com/

When football was taken away by the global restrictions put in place in response to the Covid-19 pandemic it was far more than the opportunity to watch 22 people kick a ball around that was lost. I am very much an advocate for football being everyone’s game, but for men in particular football is a social adhesive, it is the means by which we forge close personal relationships and express our emotions most openly and honestly.

That is why our obsession with this game can seem so out of proportion and why when we were no longer able to gather at the football, it hit us so hard. Speak to football fans about what they missed and it is always their fellow fans that come first, not the game itself but the friendships, the gathering pre-match to have a drink and talk, share news and be together. The football can be rubbish, sometimes it feels like you’ll never see another win, a goal, or even a shot on target, ever again, but it never stops you turning up. Yet, Covid did.

In The Silence of the Stands Daniel Gray explores that strange season when football went away for so many and though I write from the perspective of the emotionally restrained male, I shouldn’t labour that point, because this is indeed a book for all football fans, just like the game itself. When a tentative route back is opened up in the lower leagues, Daniel travels through the North of the United Kingdom watching whatever games he can, absorbing all the little things that make up going to the football and relishing them.

If you are familiar with his writing you will recognise this love of the little things that make the game. The book opens with a quote from the legendary Italian coach Arrigo Sacchi that perfectly balances the importance and the frivolousness of our game in a way that Bill Shankley’s more famous pronouncement missed: “Football is the most important of the least important things in life.” Sacchi puts football in its place, neither overstating nor patronising it, and it is from that viewpoint that Daniel Gray joyously celebrates it.

Each chapter is built around a game, but as with all the best books about sport the author also delves into a wider context, picking up elements of historical and social note in each of the towns he visits. In this way I learnt about the life and work of Lancaster’s Richard Owen, as well as his slightly disturbing legacy in the town’s local news, softened my opinions of the Leeds and England manager Don Revie and found myself Googling for images of Rothbury FC’s Armstrong Park that is enchantingly described prior to their game with Forest Hall.

Sometimes I question why I put so much emotion and energy into this game and then something comes along that reveals the answers. This weekend it was sitting amongst friends in the Trent End watching my bottom of the table Forest beat Liverpool, a couple of weeks ago it was standing on the car park gate at Southwell City chatting to groundhoppers visiting our United Counties League club to see the new floodlights in action. The reasons are various and The Silence of the Stands captures that whole spectrum throughout the unique and precious pyramid that gives it life.

I had wondered whether I had read all I wanted to about football, whether it had all been said, but when it is done well football writing opens up something much deeper within us. Daniel Gray does it well and connects us to an ongoing community that we experience in our individual, local clubs but in unison with millions past, present and future. Football isn’t a matter of life and death, but it does permeate our experience of both and allows some of us, who might otherwise struggle, to navigate them better.

[Peter Fleming · Rating 5 out of 5]

The end of the 2019/20 season was an odd one, after a three-month hiatus it was rushed to completion. Season 2020/21 was the season that pass fans by, one where a journalist pass was the equivalent of Willy Wonka’s golden ticket that provided access to a sterile football environment and lower down the pyramid every man and his dog played of their lose connections to clubs to get into behind closed doors games. The lengths that fans would go to to get their football fix is captured perfectly, such as the old man and the ladder incident, that have the reader wishing they were there to see it. In the book though he has played fair and covered games that admitted fans to the games, albeit in small numbers, rightly so because the fans are the game and what give the excellent prose life.

The author is a true son of the north, I’ll avoid the is Middlesborough in Yorkshire argument, and writes with passion about it. Yes the post industrial north can be grim, to live there and to visit, but there is beauty and wonder all around if you look for it and Mr Gray certainly has an eye for it.

Its not just a series of match reports though, those being very funny at times, as there are tangential thoughts which spring up as well. There’s a fond piece on a famous son of Middlesborough, Don Revie a remarkable man who still divides opinions vehemently all these years later. Its remarkable that Revie and Brian Clough were separated by just a few streets, that they should have a shared background, rise to the top at around the same time and yet produce such differing football philosophies.

Fans of nostalgia are in for a treat with his recollections of the death of Bootham Crescent as his second team (something he agonises over) York City move to their modern practical but aesthetically sterile new ground. There’s real pathos as he describes the ground during demolition, but this is beautifully counterbalanced by the arrival of the wooden seat from the stand he was able to buy.

Mention of Covid is unavoidable, producing the raison d'être for the book after all, but mainly confined to some of the more absurd regulations in force and how some people choose to react to them. Some of us affected by it, those who have lost loved ones, will still find it chilling to recall the virus but I’m sure at some point will look back at this period with disbelief. In twenty years, young fans will read about it with a sense of disbelief.

It’s a book that conjures a myriad of feelings in the reader but most of all it shines with its humour. From the clever pun in the title, it is a book that will have you chuckling, sniggering, and guffawing as you read. From the sarcastic abuse dished out to linesmen by the fans to likening a player to the Bash Street Kid the Beano forgot to draw is all there page after page. A master class in how to take a difficult time and produce a work which is not only uplifting and at touching at times but most of all bloody hilarious. The book is worth reading for this aspect alone, but I’m certain you will get so much more out of it. I’m typing here with a bloody big grin on my face!

The Silence of the Stands is a magnificent testament to the season that wasn’t for the fans and the importance of the game to so many of us and it’s part in the social fabric of life.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Thinking backwards through my journey, …, the tenacity and resilience of our love for the game stood out.”

Gray is a football addict! When the pandemic hit and football matches were abandoned, he was missing something in this life (as were many other football fans). The pre-match rituals, the post match analysis over a pint, catching Final Score and Match of The Day. The weekends had such a different outlook for those passionate fans.

His blow by blow account of matches were like reading the transcript of the radio commentary. In the midst of the year of discontent and lockdowns, Gray shines a spotlight on the clubs, grounds and matches that would be lucky to get a mention on Final Score, let alone in depth commentary. With the majority of his match attendance being across the North West of England, he gives a wee history lesson to the club as well a guide of his journey from station to ground.

“The whole team celebrated, and a resonant, sustained cheer that the men of 1909 and 1911 would have been humbled by flew from the mouths of travellers in yellow and black scarves.”

His attendance of his first professional game as restriction lifting was being tested was interesting. The sheer desperation to get a seat in the Riverside a 1 in 34 allocation against all other season ticket holders. The elation of succeeding in getting the golden ticket to see a professional game. The shock of hot water and soap in the men’s toilets – never heard of in normal circumstances

I have to say, the mention of my favourite manager in this book brought a smile to my face. A book with a nod of the great Brian Clough can’t be bad! When Gray headed to Lancaster, I had to do a bit of map surfing of the city (yes Lancaster is a city) as I’d forgotten where the ground was and really didn’t know there was a museum (my student brains had other things in mind)! But in the process, I saw a city that had changed beyond recognition in the period since I’d studied there! Other than the Queen Victoria statue in Dalton Square!

The match between Rothbury and Forest Hall in the Team Valley Carpets Combination Cup was an entertaining read. Armstrong Park sounds an interesting ground and the idea of the linesmen being a pair of substitute players is reminiscent to my eldest’s first friendly where one of the opposition’s dad was the ref!

This is not a pandemic book as you’d think but it’s the impact of covid on one football fan and how he dealt with the inability to got to his regular football fixtures. I really liked reading Gray’s experience of his return to match attendance. I’ll admit it wasn’t the most uplifting of books (not unexpected given the period of football we’re talking about) but Gray did add bouts of humour to his narrative which had such a life defining backdrop. He was bang on the nose when he wrote:

“It was a remarkable season. May there never be another like it.”

[Joe O'Donnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Covid-ravaged football season of 2020-2021 was perhaps the weirdest in the history of the English game. It is this topsy-turvy season that Daniel Gray has sought to document in “The Silence of the Stands”, by attempting to travel to as many far-flung football fixtures across England and Scotland as had survived the pandemic restrictions.

Daniel Gray is seemingly incapable of writing a dull or run-of-the-mill sentence, no matter how prosaic his journey point or how humdrum a match he is attending. Blessed with a graceful, lyrical writing style, Gray can make the creaking of a rusting old turnstile seem poetic.

If it were possible to find fault with “The Silence of the Stands”, it is regrettably much too short (admittedly, not the most grievous of issues to have with any book), although its brevity is at least partly explained by the abridged nature of the 2020-21 football season that Gray is documenting.

“The Silence of the Stands” is an excellent companion piece to Harry Pearson’s recent “The Farther Corner”, not least because both titles don’t limit their remit to football but also try to chart the plight of some of the forgotten post-industrial towns of Northern England and Scotland. But what makes Daniel Gray such an engaging chronicler of the game is that he truly gets the match-going experience, particularly at the lower levels, understanding that what keeps supporters coming back are the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and that “going to the match [is] about so much more than the going to the match”.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniel Gray is a stylist among football writers who can lay claim to matching the lyricism of the best cricket and baseball scribes. His work is unashamedly romantic and this lovely book is a great addition to his work of which Saturday 3pm was perhaps the previous highlight. The book does a great job of evoking that most curious of seasons – the lockdown campaign that saw restricted entry and many behind closed doors matches. Personally, I didn’t return to watch football until 2022 aside from the odd sparsely attended match at Milton Keynes Irish FC but Gray was bolder. The chapters follow a pattern where the locale in which a match takes place is fascinatingly described in its social and cultural context – as non-league clubs that declined in the 1970s, Southport and Workington are great choices and there are some superb sections from north of the border. This reader would certainly have preferred more coverage from below the Watford Gap especially in view of similar available books from Gray’s fellow When Saturday Comes podcaster Harry Pearson which also deal with northern themes. The sections describing the actual sporting encounters themselves are less gripping, if still delightfully written, but the book is especially excellent on the madness of Great Britain across 2020 and 2021.

[Tony M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniel Gray’s telling of his football-watching Odyssey across Northern England, taking in some almost-forgotten and some never-before-heard-of outposts of the game, captures both the essence of spectating at football games far away from the glamour of the Premier League and the nervous, apprehensive but defiant mood of the British public during the time of pandemic and lockdowns. The writer has followed a winning recipe of a potted history of the football clubs visited, some local colour about the host town, keenly observed match reporting and humorous observations on the attendant crowd - all sprinkled with a heavy helping of nostalgia. This book is recommended reading for football devotees but also for those who would enjoy an unusual travelogue covering some Northern towns well off the beaten tourism track.

My one criticism of a book which I thoroughly enjoyed is that the writer really overdoes the metaphors to an irritating extent, with a metaphor seemingly shoehorned into every paragraph. He’s like a baker who puts too many raisins in his dough for a batch of pain au raisin.

[Russell George · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this. Daniel Gray is the poet laureate of football supporters, revelling in the ethos and minutiae of going not necessarily to follow your own club, but the experience what it means to go to a football match. This is a travelogue of Gray charting this experience during the pandemic, a year when non-league football became one of the few areas of life where people could come together, albeit socially distanced. It’s beautifully written throughout. Gray, it’s fair to say, loves a simile, and in the past I’ve felt that some of his writing would have benefited from a less obliging editorial hand, but here there were very few occasions where the writing became over-wrought; rather, there was a gentle, endearing flow of the whole book, so that by the end I wished there had been another 100 pages at least.

[Alan Coll-Peacock · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "lost" football seasons through the pandemic were ones I don't think any football fan will ever forget. For some time the sport tried to keep going, but the lower levels struggled without supporters there to bring the vital funds in. Being a part of a non league club during that time means I saw it from the inside as well as from the supporters perspective, but that's just my local team. This book gives readers a much broader, and more northern based look at how the loss of football and the absence of fans from terraces impacted people during the pandemic. It's a great little read, the author is fantastic at bringing the imagery of what he's seen to life for the reader, and speaks with the love of a true football fan. This won't be for everyone though, so while I rate it a solid 5 stars, it's not one I'd necessarily recommend to people who don't follow football.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

With thanks to the author, publishers Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This is an account of the hole left in the author's life by the lack of live football for spectators to attend during covid lockdown in the UK, and how he took the first opportunity available to him to get back to that way of life as soon as it arose, albeit mainly at a grassroots football level in the north of England where he is from and in Scotland. He describes his experiences of attending games at clubs like Lancaster City, Kendal Town and Rothbury, and the characters he saw and met while attending those games. There are plenty of both funny and sad moments throughout to keep the reader interested in what is his personal recollection of a time that I'm sure most people found challenging for their own particular reasons.

[Greville Waterman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniel Gray is a lyrical writer who just happens to write about football - something that all football fans should give thanks for.

Here he meanders across the North of England celebrating the return of spectators at matches after Covid and has written an entertaining and thoughtful travelogue and musing on what watching the game means to him and us all.

The biggest compliment I can pay him is to remark that this book reads so well that it could easily have been written by other wonderful writers such as Harry Pearson and Duncan Hamilton.

I enjoyed reminders of faded glory at the likes of Workington and Southport when they both graced the Football League before falling into non league obscurity.

Thoughtful and entertaining, this is a book to both relish and cherish.

[Andrew Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mans journey to find out what visiting a football match was like during the lockdown - answer is exactly the same but with less people. 250 pages to find this out. Each chapter takes the general format of find an obscure game, visit and write about the town then do a match report. some of it is good, some of it is really dull and like all books about football, you have to be emotionally invested in what he is specifically writing about. The historical bits were good and also the early managerial career of Bill Shankley and the author's walk round Bootham Crescent, but throughout, I couldnt shake the feeling that this was a book for the sake of writing a book.Netgalley arc.

[Matthew Eyre · Rating 1 out of 5]

Great book about footballs, indeed life's, lost season. Hard to think that just three years ago we were in the offfirst, and really only true, lock down. Imagine a world where we thought everyone was obeying the rules Daniel Gray certainly was, and I enjoyed it in a rather "I've read this book before" sort of way. This genre has its own tropes like any other: more figurative language than a Year 6 Sats revision class. They also borrow liberally from other favoured sources, as here where Gray references the famous 'I never had friends like that again, who does' 'line, passing it off as his own I cannot think of a single When Saturday Comes guy who hasn't watched "Stand by me....

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all suffered during Covid lockdowns and missed the things we love and were unable to do.
I too, am a non-league football fan. Although this possibly is quite a niche book for a minority of people, I felt that every word was being spoken directly to me. All my feelings, frustrations and emptiness was right there on the page in front of me.
Some of the stuff about Shankly, I did not know and it was fascinating to read.
Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing PLC for providing me with an Advance Reader's Copy in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel Gray always writes so poetically about the everyday. This book is a travelogue of sorts, tentatively visiting football grounds as things opened up (then closed down again) during the worst point of the Covid outbreak. I am glad that the lived experience of this period is being documented. The book reports on these often obscure football games, but also surveys the towns and people encountered on the way. As the title says, Daniel manages to find joy when he casts his keen eye over these places.

[jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

A football book for all seasons, made more poignant by the description of matches during the Pandemic. The writer beautifully captures the voices of "local" football both on and off the pitch. The joy and release of football during these difficult times emphasises the delight of supporting the beautiful game.
thank you to netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for an advance copy of this book

[Jonny Brick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plenty of poetic prose to savour, with lots of football history and psychogeography (two of my favourite things). A pandemic mood piece which is up there with DG's best work. I can't wait for the season where his daughter is old enough to join him on one of his travelogues!

[Daniel Hayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyable. Keen to seek out more of Daniel's work based upon this.

[Brian Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good effort but tries too hard in my view. Overly descriptive it's more like a radio commentary trying to cram too much in. A more relaxed version would have been better I feel.

[RJC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anecdotes from non-league football, and how the football culture coped during lock down.

[William Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable read

[Don McKinlay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel Gray doing what he does. A book about the moments that rose and fell in the season that covid killed
It works for me

[Gary K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit dull although it did capture the atmosphere of covid matches with not many people there