Football

I see that football appears to be infesting TV again. Live and let live, but I’ve never understood games with balls. Well, some of them I understand, of course, I just don’t understand the obsession and fascination with them. But, I have my obsessions in other areas, so fair enough.

My disinterest in football specifically, has not been an easy journey to keep to the straight and narrow within.

As a child, when I moved up from the Brighton area to the North London area and went to school, the yobs would stop me in the playground and say “Which team to you support?”. The answer could only ever be “Tottenham” or “Arsenal” as this was in the days when you supported a local team rather than just Man United regardless of where you live (I’ve never understood why it changed to that, surely you should always support your local? Isn’t that why they are local in the first place?). If you got the answer wrong you’d get beaten up.

I very quickly sussed that looking for tell-tale signs, like the colour of the scarf they were wearing and saying that team, would help avoid being punched. However, they started to suss this was the ruse being used by me and my peer group of hippies uninterested in football, and hid all hints making it more of a lottery. I tried the honest “I don’t support any, I don’t like football” reply but that got the immediate response that I was gay, and they’d beat me up for being gay.

My early introduction into gay martyrdom was ok I suppose, apart from not really having any gay tendencies, and the trauma in later life of discovering that most gay men are actually football fans anyway! Why didn’t these bullies realise that?

In the end, I found the answer was to say “Brighton and Hove Albion” (which I’d heard of, having previously lived near the ground) which would completely throw them. I could then enter into a conversation with either a “Tottenham” or an “Arsenal” supporter about how crap the “Seagulls” were and they would just verbally taunt me for being a loser supporting a team of losers, rather than beat me up. I’d be winning though, ‘cos they were taunting me about stuff I had no care about or interest in, but it kept them happy to believe I did.

Also, appearing to support a team they knew nothing about wasn’t going to trip me up when the conversation got advanced into the idolatry and prowess of individual players.