As I sit experiencing the
excitement and drama that is the shuffle setting on my iPod, I find myself
being serenaded by the dulcet tones of John Barnes rapping away during World In
Motion by New Order (englandneworder to the purists). A nice tune that stirs
some memories of Italia ’90, David Platt’s last gasp winner, Chris Waddle’s
disappearing mullet and some bloke from Cameroon kicking Claudio Caniggia
halfway back to Argentina. Sadly there is no football tournament this year and
despite the Premier League seemingly ending about 6 weeks later than usual,
August and the chance to watch my beloved Oxford United seem a long way off. So
with my season ticket finally purchased and with my money probably already
making its way down the drain, I think back to last season and some of the
highlights. However I fail to come up with anything other than one of our
players trying to do to Edgar Davids what the Cameroon player had done to
Caniggia.
One match does spring to mind, although I would
hesitate to call it a highlight. On a surprisingly wintery Saturday afternoon
in late March I stood in
sub zero temperatures, with wet feet and hard nipples, being showered with snow
and presumably spit from the ludicrously angry man behind me, watching my
beloved Oxford United put in a rather pitiful display against a not-much-better
Northampton Town. I watched as the final nail in the coffin of our season was
being hammered in with the help of some woeful finishing by our strikers and I
despaired as the midfield proved to be as creative as pissing in said snow. All
of the above and the 1-0 defeat are a fairly common occurrence here, as are the
repetitive and nonsensical interview with our hapless and hopeless manager
Chris ‘I wouldn’t know a decent midfielder if one sat on my face’ Wilder. After
the extremely welcome final whistle blew, we squelched back to the car with our
lips chapped and our blains chilled and removed our slush sodden boots. We
listened to the interview and shouted the same thing we had been shouting all
season, mostly containing the words ‘twat’, ’useless’ and ‘fuck off, you’. ‘I
don’t know what else to do’, came the sack worthy excuse from a man finally
admitting what some of us had figured out months ago. Half an hour after
reaching the car, we finally made it out of the car park that we had paid £4
for (I know, the cheeky bastards) and headed home along the roundabout riddled
A43.
You might look at that and think
‘that sounds like a fairly crap day, no wonder she’s moaning.’ But actually I’m
not. That’s just how the day went, football fans simply accept that this
happens to them. We don’t stop going because there’s a good chance we might
lose, we keep going because there is just as good a chance we might win. Well,
maybe not just as good, but you never really know what is going to happen, it’s
a risk we are happy to take. We don’t mind the weather or the wait in the car
park or the lack of decent toilet facilities (yes Swindon Town, I’m looking at
you). It all adds to the experience and we will happily drive hundreds of miles
for the pleasure of it. I love it when people say things like ‘can’t believe
you went all that way to watch them lose’. No, I went all that way to watch
them play, I didn’t know they were going to lose, did I? Several years ago we
won a home game 1-0 with the goal coming in the first minute and a colleague of
mine decided that it must have been a dull match because it was all over after
60 seconds. That train of thought mystifies me in the same way as people who
assume that 0-0 draws are always dull. You don’t know that’s going to be the
final score until the whistle goes! I try to explain the beauty of
unpredictability to her, but then you realise you are talking to someone who
probably spent the previous evening crying over some soap storyline they read
was going to happen weeks ago. 
It always amazes me that people
have no problem in quite aggressively expressing their hatred and lack of
interest in football, more so than any other past time. It never seems to occur
to them how rude or insulting they are being. They almost proudly announce that
they have no understanding of the actually-quite-simple offside rule and then
if you try to explain it they say ‘no don’t tell me, I don’t want to know’.
Well that’s probably why you don’t understand it then. They are quite happy in
their ignorance and lack of interest in something that might actually be quite
important to their partner or friend or relative. I’d like to think that if
someone has a real passion for a subject, that I will be decent and polite
enough to let them talk about it or explain to me why it gripped them so much.
I would never be so rude as to just say to them ‘no, I’m not interested, don’t
talk to me about it’, even if I wasn’t that interested in it. How sad that
people can’t have any respect for something that people spend so much time and
money on, that stirs such a passion in them, can reduce them to tears and send
them in to a state of ecstasy in the space of minutes. How sad that people can
only focus on the negative aspects and not consider that actually this is quite
an important part of life for some. I asked another football sceptic friend of
mine once how many moments she had had in her life that made her literally jump
up and down with sheer excitement and shout at the top of her voice in the way
a football fan will when their team hit the back of the net. She struggled to think of any but I’ve had hundreds (should have had more admittedly but there you go) Why is
something that makes you feel that way frowned upon so much, what harm does it
do to anyone else? We do all realise that it’s not a matter of life and death
despite Bill Shankly’s legendary and fairly ridiculous speech, it’s just a past
time we enjoy and the majority of us manage to enjoy it without smashing in the
faces of the opposing fans as well. As a supporter of a lower league team, I
often wonder what drives the fans of clubs like Manchester United and Chelsea
who expect to win every game. How can they understand the joy of standing with
a couple of hundred other fans on a freezing cold evening, watching your team
grind out a win against Kidderminster Harriers , or the feeling of not being
able to sleep because you are still buzzing so much from knocking a team three
leagues above you out of the cup. Where’s the joy for those fans in beating
teams like Hull and Norwich week in, week out? That’s what they’re expected to
do.
So as we trudged away from the
Sixfields stadium, my brother and I chatted about the game at Swindon in August
2011 which was surely the ying to this games yang. A gloriously sunny day, our
skin burning in the uncovered terrace, two beautiful goals from the rather
marvellous James Constable sealing our first win at the County Ground (do your
own graffiti there) for 28 years. As a game it was as close to perfection as
you can get, but now felt like another lifetime. As the song from the terrace
goes, I’m sure we’ll win again some sunny day. 