Same Difference: Five Conflicting Thoughts on Crossing the Park

On Liverpool Football Club’s official website, you can find an article (posted in 2017) listing ‘ten of the best players to play for both LFC and Everton.’[1] Above the headline, two similar photographs are posted of Geordie forward Peter Beardsley (Liverpool, 87-91; Everton, 91-93) one representing him in his days as a Red, the other during his subsequent spell with the Blues. In the first of the pictures (each showing Beardsley in action) he leans to the left; in the second, he shifts his weight to the right. Formally, the images mirror each other; and thus aligned, Beardsley is both doubled and reversed. He is beside himself — and breaking away from himself. In the clashing colours of Merseyside rivals, he veers in opposing directions — as if he has been divided into co-existing but conflicting identities. He is at once the same player, the same man, and someone else again. Discussing other players who crossed the chasm of Stanley Park — the one-hundred-acre green space between Liverpool and Everton’s home grounds — the article shows each one in a pair of compare-and-contrast snapshots that, in some cases, could be of different people. The young Steve McMahon (Everton, 79-83) is juxtaposed with his older self, the seasoned pro Steve McMahon (Liverpool, 85-91). Teenage hopeful Kevin Sheedy, smiling optimistically as a fledgling Liverpool player — but eventually playing only three games in his four years there (78-82) — is pictured alongside Kevin Sheedy the heroic Everton FC veteran, arguably one of the greatest players in the club’s history (82-92). From image to image, jump-cutting from Red to Blue or Blue to Red, we see connection and disconnection. One after another: one person, split into two.

The LFC site’s ‘ten of the best’ list concludes with Dave Hickson: an Everton player 1948-55, then again from 1957-59, who shocked fans on both sides of Stanley Park when he transferred to Liverpool at the beginning of the 1959-60 season. Hickson’s success at Everton (especially in his first phase with the club) had guaranteed his revered status as a club icon — on the pitch he was an impassioned, combative character, earning the early nickname of ‘cannonball kid’ — while also distinguishing him as a derby-day hate figure for the Anfield faithful. (The sobriquet used by Liverpool fans was ‘Dirty Dave.’) His controversial move in 1959 angered both sets of supporters — but it was an anger that expressed itself in curious ways and, on one side at least, faded fast. Some Everton loyalists vowed to break ranks and follow Hickson to Liverpool — an unthinkably heretical proposition. Even in the face of mass dissent, players could opt to change clubs — but fans? Many within the Liverpool community were sufficiently dismayed to consider abandoning their club altogether; whereas for others, the new signing was to be cherished: a prize stolen from the enemy camp. Indeed, on the occasion of Hickson’s first Liverpool game (as an obituary writer recalled following Hickson’s death in 2013) “one fellow raced across the grass to embrace the newcomer and plant a kiss on his cheek.”[2]

Two days after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on 10th April 1998, a letter landed on the desks of Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam, Scotland Secretary Donald Dewar and British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Authored by Alastair Campbell, at that time Blair’s chief press secretary, the letter outlined a novel idea for the promotion of the two simultaneous referenda — one on each side of the British-Irish border — that would present the landmark multi-party accord for public approval. Campbell’s idea was to stage a Celtic versus Rangers match in Belfast, bringing together the two teams most obviously, and divisively, associated with Catholic and Protestant communities in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The proposal included, nonetheless, a twist. In Belfast, on this occasion of aspirational reconciliation, each team would take to the pitch wearing the familiar kit and colours of their rivals: Celtic in the red-white-and-blue of Rangers; the latter sporting the green and white hoops of the former. One team would, temporarily, become the other; celebrating and promoting the spirit of the Agreement by swapping identities. Campbell, while optimistic, conceded that securing the participation of the two squads would be a challenge. At the very least, he acknowledged, “one or two of the Rangers players to my certain knowledge would have a difficulty with this…”[3] Predictably, perhaps, his letter received no response.

When details of the scheme emerged, following the release of British government papers in July 2022, Campbell admitted his plan — which, he said, “lasted about five seconds” — was ludicrous. Journalists responding to the discovery of this minor moment of peace process history tended to agree. One report (written for Irish football website balls.ie) typified the prevailing tone of mocking incredulity: “It will come as zero surprise to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the Celtic/Rangers rivalry and the politics of Northern Ireland and Scotland, that nothing would come of the idea.”[4] Yet for all the proposal’s obvious downsides — the combination of naivety and vanity in its conception, the inherent lack of historical understanding and cultural sensitivity, the emphasis on short-term PR spectacle — those ‘five seconds’, and the silence and scepticism that followed, seem potentially instructive. Asking Celtic and Rangers squads to fleetingly switch sides, to change, just for one game, the appearance of their public allegiance — and so too then, asking fans to briefly identify with different colours — was an unrealistic proposition. But such wild thinking, intentionally or not, signals existing boundaries of thought: alerting us to the limits of the possible, to the habits and histories that draw such lines. Discussing the utopian potential of science fiction, Fredric Jameson writes that “even our wildest imaginings are all collages of experience, constructs made up of bits and pieces of the here and now” — and as such “our imaginations are hostages” to our present conditions, and to remnants of the past.[5] Nevertheless, for Jameson, utopian speculation retains a paradoxical value, serving “the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.” “The best utopias,” Jameson says, “are those that fail the most comprehensively.”[6]

Michael Hanna has swapped shirts, switched loyalties, crossed the park from Goodison to Anfield. His efforts to do so are, on the one hand, an artist’s speculative proposition — a performative exercise in calculated transgression and wild imagining — and, on the other, a real-life commitment. His decision will have enduring effects: it involves lasting change, presenting ongoing personal and social challenges. How might relationships be altered, even damaged, by this move? How might Evertonian friends, family members or other fans respond to this confounding act of apostasy? Hanna must leave part of himself behind, rejecting the football club he once embraced, an embrace that can feel as meaningful and necessary as any directly human relationship: a matter of life and death … or more important than that. (Notably, in order to deepen his understanding of social relationships and social divisions, Hanna sought guidance from Dr. Rhiannon Turner of Queen’s University, Belfast, an expert in the psychology of ‘intergroup relations, prejudice and prejudice-reduction’, learning techniques for fostering forms of commonality with, and successfully distancing oneself from, specific communities of shared interest.[7])

Crossing the Park perhaps echoes the experience of those players who have played for both clubs. Michael Hanna must adjust to different circumstances and expectations (such as, at the risk of betraying an affiliation here, the promise and pleasure of success) and adapt to the interests of a new community: cultivating new relationships, experiencing new conditions of revelry and rivalry. But whereas players might retain, beneath the professional commitments of their contracts, an underlying loyalty to one or other long-supported team, Hanna’s Blue-Red transfer policy requires definitive change. His move centres on the willed necessity — and extreme difficulty — of consequential becoming. The goal in crossing the park is to fully become a Liverpool fan, not merely to pretend or perform. Hanna’s intent is to properly change position and perspective: to believe and belong. At times, during the three years (thus far) of Hanna’s slowly-evolving project, multiple methods have been employed to achieve this unconventional ambition: experimental approaches that might be viewed, variously, as altruistic, absurd or alarming. To stimulate the emergence of new feelings of support, the right feelings for the new circumstances, Hanna not only attempted to cultivate empathy for Liverpool players by reading biographies or watching videos of team members participating in charity events, but also set about jump-starting his emotional attachment to the Reds with radical stick-and-carrot tactics. During games, incredibly, he gave himself electric shocks each time Liverpool conceded a goal. By contrast, when Liverpool scored, he’d eat chocolate: a simultaneously pleasurable and problematic strategy when following a high-scoring team. Indeed, during his Blue-Red conversion process, Hanna added a stone and a half to his original weight.

In certain respects, this contrarian venture compares with other artistic efforts to transform the self. We might think of artists who craft co-existing alter-egos and parallel identities, or those who permanently re-invent and rename themselves as new personalities — locking away the facts of their autobiographical origins — or those who efface and question ‘authentic’ identity through perpetual, ever-evolving performance, or, again, those who engage the body as a malleable medium, altering its form and appearance through medical and surgical intervention. Hanna’s approach resembles some of the above and none of the above. In his art and life, he is still himself, but newly aligned; the same, but different. His undertaking has the high-minded ambition of a transformative artistic act, but also the embedded mundanity of a step-by-step change in everyday behaviour. As such, resemblances to earlier experiments in artistic self-questioning (and self-construction) are perhaps strongest where we can see a shared tendency to express high-minded conceptual intentions in unspectacular styles, through low-key representations and actions.

Two artists, two examples, ten years apart: each a test of connection and disconnection, sameness and difference.

In 1998, the Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi — at that time a twenty-four year old student — decided to become his own father. His instinct was to disappear, to leave himself behind, and he found a model of re-constituted identity in the familiar, proximate figure of sixty-something Cuoghi Senior. Though an emerging artist, young Roberto resisted describing this personal change-process in terms tied to existing expectations of art (even given the diverse, expanded forms of lived and performed art that flourished throughout the twentieth century). His preferred term for the endeavour was to call it a “transformation” — and, indeed, as Alison M. Gingeras has written, “transformation” might be thought of as Cuoghi’s principle artistic medium: “his primary activity is the alteration of the experiences, representations, and expectations of daily life.”[8] Like Michael Hanna’s vow to see and feel from another position, to become a rival version of himself, Cuoghi’s wish was to begin a process of determined becoming — a transformative life-choice with profound consequences. Step-by-step, then, Cuoghi adopted his father’s appearance: putting on substantial extra weight, dying his hair grey, wearing the older man’s suits. By doing so, he triggered other changes, physical and personal. The cost of carrying quite a few additional pounds was, eventually, a dangerous level of pressure on his heart, and so his health deteriorated. One effect of his new appearance — with his ‘true’ self wholly inaccessible to strangers — was a form of public respect. As Gingeras recalls, “when stopping for breakfast in a Milanese café or running errands in local shops, he received the kind of cortesia reserved for a grandparent.” As he changed, the world changed around him. Cuoghi’s ‘transformation’ was maintained for seven years. Beyond that, the effort of enforced ageing would have been too hard on his health. But returning to who he was beforehand was impossible too. The transformation had a permanent impact; in some ways, even with the passing of those seven years, he had become a different kind of person, maybe a different person altogether. Cuoghi made himself disappear by living as a man inside an encompassing mask; when he chose to reappear, the mask had changed the man.

In 2008, American artist Roni Horn made a sequence of thirty small photographic prints, presented in compare-and-contrast pairs, collectively titled A.K.A.. Drawn from the personal archives of friends and family, these snapshot diptychs show, in each left-and-right instance, Horn at different stages of life — child versus adult, growing up and getting old — much like those side-by-side images of Liverpool and Everton players at opposing clubs, pictured at different times in their careers. Horn’s photographs represent the same person, but by drawing attention to changes in physique, facial expression, fashion and more, she pursues a fascination with inconsistency rather than continuity. Separate from each other in time, she sees these paralleled figures as only distant relations: the juxtaposed versions of the self so dissimilar as to seem only loosely connected. The younger person — a quite specific manifestation of being — is now lost to time, irrevocably changed. The older figure is distinct, existing in another form, in another historical moment. For Roni Horn, there is no need to see these signs of discontinuity as a loss: “the mutable version of identity is not an aberration,” she suggests; rather, “the fixed version is the aberration.”[9] Perhaps, in this way — like Crossing the Park — A.K.A. points to limits of how we ordinarily position and define ourselves as one reliably persisting human personality. And perhaps Horn’s artwork resists, in Fredric Jameson’s terms, the “mental and ideological imprisonment” that might be one way of describing a unified understanding of the self. Michael Hanna’s physical appearance does not change during his process of crossing over — beyond team colours, and the recent addition of a Liver bird tattoo on his shoulder blade, we would expect to see the same person — but in converting to another club he has dared himself to decisively alter a key part of his outlook: working towards the realisation of a self that responds to certain events and experiences in new ways, a self that will, some of the time at least, feel differently from the earlier self. Maybe, at this level, what Hanna has attempted is crazy. Maybe what he’s proposing can’t be done. Or maybe, as A.K.A. implies, we do it all the time.

Echoing Roni Horn’s outlook, the psychoanalyst Adam Philips writes of how “we are changing all the time — growing older and older, whether we want to or not — while often wanting to choose, or … design, the ways in which we change.” (Even how we think about change, he adds, “changes over time.”)[10] Yet certain change processes depend on a principle — often forcefully applied — of ‘conversion’: an idea grounded in beliefs, as Philips says, “that a person can be recreated or reborn, as something quite different.”[11] Conversion is nonetheless a matter of definition, rather than, in Philips view, transformation. And so it requires, implicitly, a kind of selective attention: “in conversion narratives something about a person gets selected out for conversion — sinfulness, violence, sexuality, religious belief, hearts and minds — while there are other things about people it wouldn’t occur to us to convert.”[12] Much about an identity will remain unconverted, even in the most dramatic cases. Indeed, for Philips, conversion is a form of “substitution”, it “replaces one thing with another” — and as such it is, he suggests, “a cover story… a reconfiguring rather than a radical transformation.”[13] Beneath the appearance of newness and difference, “conversion may change everything by keeping everything the same”.[14] (Philips cites the poet Paul Valery: “God made the world out of nothing… but the nothing shows through.”)[15]

One important characteristic of Michael Hanna’s arduously self-created situation of conversion is its framing within clearly defined parameters. Crossing the Park centres on a daunting but necessarily restricted life-change: a transfer of affiliation between teams from the same place, playing the same sport, at (broadly) the same level. Defecting to the ‘other side’ is a movement inside a shared world. In one respect, Hanna makes it sound simple: merely a matter of crossing the park. And if the expectation is, then, that we will be drawn towards all that changes in this challenge — and all that is challenging in this change — couldn’t we also note how much stays the same? We might, in other words, concentrate on possibilities of underlying continuity and commonality, considering all that binds opposing identities together, even as we recognise the depth and meaning of an historically complex local rivalry. As a comment on football, of course, this feels a little corny — largely missing the point of sporting conflict. But Hanna’s attempt to transfer support from Everton to Liverpool is, above all, an exercise in new or deepened understanding — and in this regard it sends us beyond football too, triggering comparisons with other social scenarios of disagreement and difference. One key motivation behind Crossing the Park, Hanna has noted, was a wish to respond, on his own risk-taking terms, to extreme polarisation in contemporary political discourse. For this reason, it makes sense to see his project — in part at least — as a speculative game of engagement versus entrenchment. Hanna asks us to think seriously about what it means to be more than one thing, to occupy more than one position: to be both insider and outsider, ally and opponent, on one side of the park and the other.

— Declan Long

[1] Dominic Raynor,’ Ten of the best players to play for both LFC and Everton’, 10th December, 2017, https://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/first-team/283560-10-of-the-best-players-to-play-for-both-lfc-and-everton.

[2] Ivan Ponting ‘Dave Hickson: Rugged striker who served three Merseyside clubs’, The Independent, Thursday 11th July, 2013; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/dave-hickson-rugged-striker-who-served-three-merseyside-clubs-8703922.html

[3] Colman Stanley, ‘Alastair Campbell Had A Wild Old Firm Derby Idea To Promote Good Friday Agreement’, Balls.ie, Apr 07, 2023; https://www.balls.ie/football/alastair-campbell-celtic-rangers-517495

[4] Ibid.

[5] Fredric Jameson, Archeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), p.xiii.

[6] Ibid.

[7] https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/rhiannon-turner

[8] Alison M. Gingeras: ‘Openings: Roberto Cuoghi’, Artforum, Summer 2005, Vol. 43, No.10, p.316.

[9] Roni Horn, A.K.A., 2008-9, Pinault Collection catalogue entry, https://lesoeuvres.pinaultcollection.com/en/artwork/aka.

[10] Adam Philips, On Wanting to Change (London: Penguin, 2021), pp.xi-xii.

[11] Ibid, p.75.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.