George Baldock

Sam Parry

I don’t know whether I should write this. Of course, I can. But typing words into keyboard and casting sentences about a person you never met feels at once like an intrusion into the feelings of others, and at the same time like the most natural thing in the world. Thoughts and feelings are contradictory; emotions all over the place.

But I think it’s important that people — and in some respects, especially men — try to voice big emotions with words. Because making sense of how we feel is basically life, right? The conversations you have with yourself, the churning up of things in your head, should be allowed to bleed onto the page.

I was rocked by the news of George Baldock’s death at 31. In the minutes and hours before I found out, I had been recording and editing a podcast about Sheffield United’s 9th-placed finish in the Premier League, and felt full of that warm buzz that football brings when your conversation takes you to a place of “maybe we could do it again.” And then, you hear the news, see the tweets, read the articles, and football not only seems trivial but somehow you wind up feeling guilty for having spent a even minute of the day in a good mood.

I feel guilty about the me me me-ism of feeling sad and vocalising it. Who am I to grieve? What stake do I have? I feel guilty about putting words together about a moment of private grief for his family, friends and colleagues, and collective grief for football. Catharsis? I don’t want or deserve catharsis. And honestly, tapping away is not cathartic.

Days later, I still feel devastated, angry, and shocked, unable to rationalise emotions or properly parse the news. The one thing centring my feelings is that George Baldock — like some, but unlike many other footballers — gave me a stake, and made so many fans feel attached not only to his fortunes but the fortunes of football clubs.

This isn’t a tribute. I don’t have the words to do justice to the person, and at a moment like this, language fails. Maybe by listening and reading the many tributes, thoughts and feelings, we come to some collective sense of the person; learning more, understanding more and inevitably grieving more. And for those who didn’t know him, maybe the outpouring functions to share that understanding with others. I think that is a good thing.

And yet, for some reason, social media keeps making me angry. I can’t seem to check that emotion. Neither can I watch highlight reels. The proliferation of black and white photos washes out the technicolour I remember. Three little letters or three little words: RIP, don’t sit right. It shouldn’t make me angry, and I have no right to take it personally. But I can’t help that I do — and I do. Because somehow it feels perfunctory even if the logical part of my brain knows the condolences are sincere. But the grayscale photos and the RIPs feel like signifiers of moving on, and I don’t want to move on.

Social media doesn’t pause even when as human beings you want to stop and think. I just want time to be sad. But that, I know, is self-regarding. Some things may feel trite to me now, but I hope, in future, his family can read how George Baldock left his finger-prints and stud-marks on clubs, cities and countries. There’s so much we remember, and between us all, so little we’ll forget.

Our unbeaten run in the Championship feels trivial now, of course it does. But without football, we’d never have felt the current of that connection to a human being we love in the way that fans can love a player. It all feels confusing and contradictory, but I suppose that’s because the sense of loss for someone you don’t know personally is always confusing. Still, I feel it.

“George Baldock was..” are horrible words to write. He was, as many have written already, a person and player who epitomised everything fans wants Sheffield United Football Club to be. But football is never the totality of anyone’s life, and for all that we’ve lost a much-loved ex-player, it is scarcely imaginable to think of the pain suffered by his loved ones.

With a few days to let it all sink in, I think I realise, and probably for the first time, that grieving now is bound-up with every time you’ve grieved before. It takes you back to memories and moments that are, in different ways, painful and hard to process too. You connect, in some small way, to tragedy and loss of others. And with George Baldock, you connect more because he connected with you.

In life, he made me feel happier, prouder, angrier; he made me sing louder, celebrate harder and cling tighter to those amazing memories. I guess it’s no surprise then, that his passing has been felt so acutely, because whilst there are things we couldn’t possibly know about George Baldock, we did know and we did feel that he was one of us.