It was on a 17-hour train from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow in 2018 that a small group of England fans decided they wanted to create a chant about Harry Maguire’s massive head.
This was at the Russia World Cup, in the heady early day of Gareth Southgate’s time as manager, when from seemingly nowhere he had unexpectedly led the country to the semi-finals.
Everyone was wearing M&S waistcoats, riding a wave of good vibes and inflatable unicorns and singing about the England manager making us whole again. And a centre-back nicknamed Slab Head was at the heart of everything good about the national team.
The idea of a Maguire chant germinating in minds, the fans were in a Moscow bar the night before the semi-final with Croatia when, now in a larger group, after a night of many vodkas a tray of jaeger shots was brought to the table and someone sang: “He drinks the vodka and he drinks the jaeger” and this was born:
Harry Maguire!
Harry Maguire!
He drinks the vodka,
He drinks the jaeger,
His head’s f—ing massive!
And that was how an England chant was born, a song that would several years later be adopted by Manchester United following his £80m transfer, the lyrics slightly altered.
After the chant took off in the Moscow bar, the fans tried to get the chant going in the Luzhniki Stadium, but among the 78,000 it failed to take hold, only becoming a popular fixture in games later that year.
It is sometimes wrongly attributed as a song created by United fans, which is ironic because the “Phil Foden’s On Fire” chant that has been heard across Germany has, in recent weeks, wrongly been attributed as a creation of England fans.
Phil Foden’s On Fire has become England’s unofficial anthem of Euro 2024, heard far and wide in the stadiums and plazas of Gelsenkirchen, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Dortmund and beyond.
In case you haven’t heard it live or in one of the video clips viewed in their millions on social media, sung to the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing In The Dark the lyrics go:
Can’t start a fire,
Can’t start a fire without a spark,
Phil Foden’s on fire,
He’ll be playing the Germans off the park
I came across the Maguire chant story while in search of the birth of Phil Foden’s On Fire, fascinated by how an England chant is invented and how they spread. Who comes up with them? Why? What makes them take hold?
I reached out to some England fans who have travelled home and away supporting the national team for years — in some cases decades — and nobody could say for certain where the Foden chant had started, pointing out that many England chants actually start life at players’ clubs and are lifted from there, that it was worth looking for instances of it being sung at Manchester City.
And, true enough, there were traces of the Foden chant, including the lyrics with the slightly altered last line, Dancing through the middle of the park, in Manchester City forums back in May.
Manchester City message boards and subreddits document attempts at finding a song for Foden as far back as 2021, but nothing seemed to stick. Yet as soon as the lyrics were posted to Foden’s On Fire it was an instant hit, fans talking about singing it on the sofa and not being able to get the song out of their head.
But, much to my dismay, it turned out it wasn’t invented there. It had been heard and shared. And no one I spoke to could pinpoint the exact point of conception.
The chant had been heard at City games in March. By May it had taken hold of the fanbase, sung loudly and repeatedly in Cutting Room Square, the heart of popular Ancoats, after City secured the Premier League title with a win against West Ham. After the FA Cup final defeat to Manchester United it could be heard reverberating around service stations as fans took a break on the long drive back from London.
Nine days later it made its way into the England sphere in the bars around St James’ Park and Newcastle city centre in the afternoon before the Euro 2024 warm-up game against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the north-east.
“Quite a few people were singing it in bars before the game in the afternoon,” Sam Shethran, an England Supporters’ Travel Club member, told i.
“A few people tried to get it going in the ground but it was slow going. Not many people knew the words. But it grew organically from there.”
Usually chants follow a familiar process to being widely adopted. Firstly, fans create the chant, or learn them from clubs. Then they try to get them going in bars and pubs after a few drinks, seeing if they will catch fire on social media and spread around WhatsApp groups. Then they will try the stadiums. If the England band picks up on a chant they help to get it going.
Shethran knew the Foden song was going to be a hit in Germany the day before the opening group match against Serbia.
“The bars around Cologne where I was staying and drinking the night before, quite a lot of people were singing it and knew the words and I was getting to grips with the words myself. The fact a lot of people were singing it there made me think this could grow.
“There was a lot on social media about it. People were asking what this new Phil Foden song was. Just before the tournament started I knew it was catching on, you could see it was the spark of something good.”
Foden has not, in fact, been on fire in a tournament in which England have produced a series of damp squibs. He has played out of position on the left, struggling to click with Jude Bellingham in the middle. He has not scored. But it has not stopped the song from echoing around the trains and trams on journeys to and from the stadiums and belting out of the stands before kick-off and during games.
“People are a big fan of it, it’s Bruce Springsteen, it’s catchy,” Shethran says.
“It’s not been done to death — yet. It’s getting there. I think it stuck even though he’s not playing well because everyone rates Foden so highly, everyone knows how great a player he is for Man City, though he hasn’t replicated that for England. We all rate him highly. It’s mainly due to the song, rather than the player. There are a lot of songs about player who you don’t potentially rate so highly but are catchy.”
Shethran was one of the small group of England fans on that train to Moscow who played a part in the creation of the Maguire chant. Who was the exact person who came out with the definitive version when the jaegers arrived? Now he thinks about it, Shethran isn’t sure.
And maybe that doesn’t matter — maybe these songs are only alive because of the collective effort.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/nwjPONZ
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