Football? No!

I see that football (soccer) appears to be infesting TV again, and there are lots of drones marching on Anfield and Goodison Park each weekend making it hard for me to park or to move about my business. Not to mention recent yob outbreaks of smashing windows and shouting drunken hatred at each other in the streets.  Sigh.  The Liverpool way, eh?

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 violent younger yobs (why is it always the 10 year olds intimidating the 16 year olds?) 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 Manchester United regardless of where you live (I’ve never understood why it changed to that, surely you should always only really support your local team? Isn’t that why they are given local names and play in local grounds in the first place?). 

Anyway, 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 “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).  This 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.

Those were the days, eh?