The herd remembers Alan

Thanks to Kieron for pointing this out to me.

On last week’s Match of the Day, just before highlights of the Everton match, Gary Lineker was paying tribute to the late Alan Ball, the youngest member of the 1966 England World Cup team and by far the man of the match (despite Hurst’s hat-trick) in the final itself. Alan died on 25th April of a heart-attack.

Ball was a favourite at Everton FC – he’d signed for a then record fee of £110,000 in August 1966. So it was fitting that the stadium announcer should ask the crowd to observe 1 minutes silence in honour of their former golden boy.

However what happened next was remarkable: rather than falling into silence, the stadium erupted into applause and the only known Alan Ball chant (“there’s only one…”) echoed round the ground. Now, clearly no-one could have organised or co-ordinated this. Rather, it just started at the margins of the crowd and spread quickly because the Herd mechanism kicked in.

And as the BBC cut between the other grounds around the country, the same thing happened, again and again.

Kieron links this to the spread of spontaneous applause from the Abbey on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral and I think he may be right in two senses:
i. it’s the same mechanism at play
ii. previous collective action gives us all astart point (and makes it easier for i. to operate).

I also suspect it reveals some of the emotional reward for ‘enthusiasmos‘ – it feels good to do these things, not morally but emotionally and physically, a further encouragement…