“Football is popular because stupidity is popular,” wrote the wonderful Jorge Luis Borges.
If Borges was right, and he usually was, then I have to admit to being stupid. For I like watching football almost as much as in my younger days I enjoyed playing it.
Over the years tennis has replaced football as my active sport, but even now I’d no more miss an England match in the World Cup than my own book launch. Certain things just have to be held sacred.
To this day I bitterly regret having missed the 1966 final on TV, the only one England has ever won or indeed made, and you’d think 48 years is enough time to get over it.
Still a teenager at the time, I instead went on a date with the girl I eventually married. The marriage didn’t last, but the regrets have, serving a constant reminder of how important it is to get one’s priorities right.
Still, I like to think that my reservoir of stupidity is mostly expended on football, which is why I like to use the game as a source of further-reaching observations, mostly dealing with crowd mentality and a need for tribal belonging.
My love of the game is disinterested at the club level because I don’t support any particular team. My mild preference is usually for the currently best London club, as long as it isn’t Chelsea.
That team I detest for two reasons. First, it’s owned by a disgusting Russian gangster. Second, I live not far from their stadium. Every time Chelsea plays a home match, crowds of tattooed blue-clad dipsomaniacs descend on our neighbourhood, turning it into a Millwall with better architecture.
Once we couldn’t even get home because both King’s and Fulham Roads were blocked by grex venalium celebrating their triumph in the FA Cup. The celebrations took the shape of open-top buses slowly driving through the jubilant and uniformly pissed crowd.
Cans of lager were being tossed onto the bus tops, and the fans dancing there would drain them, then throw the cans back. The continuo was provided by the crowd singing such masterpieces as “We win home and away, we win every f****** way!” and “Chelsea here, Chelsea there, Chelsea everyf******where!” The f-word, as you may realise, is the sine qua non of this poetic genre.
I opened the window of my car and asked a neutrally observing policeman, one of the regiment in attendance, why they allowed two major thoroughfares to be taken out of circulation. The cop looked at me the way St Ignatius Loyola must have looked at a heretic.
“These men have a right to celebrate, Sir,” he said. “And I have a right to get home,” I replied. “How am I going to do that?”
The officer looked at me the way St Ignatius Loyola must have looked at someone insisting on his right to worship as he saw fit. He didn’t say anything, but his expression did: “That’s your problem.”
On another occasion my wife and I were driving down King’s Road, which is densely lined with drinking establishments. Each was full to the brim, with crowds of Chelsea fans either celebrating or commiserating, I can’t remember which.
Both types of post-match festivities are identical, involving as they do championship-calibre drinking and concomitant excretions through every orifice God gave man, except ears.
That day was fine, and the crowds had spilled over onto the pavement. As we drove along, one man politely turned his back to the pub and relieved himself onto the street, narrowly missing our car as it crawled along.
My wife, who’s rather prim in such matters, immediately rang the police. “A man has just exposed himself to me on the King’s Road!” she exclaimed. “So what do you want us to do about that?” asked the officer on duty. “I want you to arrest him!” “Lady,” said the cop, “we don’t have enough men to arrest everyone who does that on match day.”
I was disloyally laughing throughout, what with my own sensibilities being considerably less refined than my wife’s.
Though public urination isn’t my chosen spectator sport, I do enjoy some of the bawdy songs our football fans often extemporise.
Once Millwall FC, the club representing the area I mentioned earlier, were playing a team from Iran. After a few minutes, the local fans began singing “You are Shiite and you know it,” changing the original lyrics only slightly. They also sang “Get your face out for the lads”, again adapting the existing mantra to the occasion.
Though perhaps wishing that these chaps channelled their ingenuity into a more productive conduit, one still has to admire the ready, if somewhat crude, wit.
During the Big Firm match in Glasgow, that is the game between the Protestant Rangers and the Catholic Celtic, the fans add a nice touch of sectarian invective to the chorus.
For example, the Rangers fans sing, to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain and in reference to the IRA terrorist who starved himself to death in prison, “Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands, would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands, would you like a chicken supper, you filthy Fenian f***er, would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?”
Every law of the genre is observed, with a few added nuances. Hope the Scots vote No in the referendum – we want them in the Union.
So fine, all football fans are stupid. I still hope England will stuff Uruguay on Thursday, and Borges is dead. Go, Ingerland! (The word is now in the OED, in case you’re wondering.)