ABSTRACT
The sense of time in football is so clearly that of dream space for principally it concerns itself with the present, the immediacy of the what next, the anticipated, the about to be. An emphatic symbol of precisely the nightmarish quality when Premiership dreaming congeals was the large-scale hoarding up at the Leppings Lane end of Sheffield Wednesday’s ground, Hillsborough, in October 2004: NEXT HOME GAME vs. HARTLEPOOL UNITED. A marker of an excruciating decline. Like so many others who were “living the dream”–they were utterly enraptured when the likes of Paolo di Canio and Benito Carbone pulled on the famous Wednesday shirt. The art of shamanic trance-facilitation utilises repetitive verbal signal patterns and rhythms, often delivered through the chanted word, sometimes backed up by the beat of the drum. For many there is no greater passion, and that imperative to love with all one’s soul and all one’s might, almost operating as a command, carries so many away.
