Are you happy with your football? I mean, are you really happy with your club, with your current team? Are any of us happy with the teams we support and have we ever really, truly, honestly, been happy? Simon Harvey tries to answer the question most of us dare not even ask...
“Ah yes, happiness,” Basil Fawlty tells Sybil after a lengthy nag, “I remember happiness”.
Pessimism, or even fatalism, is the default condition for the average supporter. Being pessimistic about your club’s chances of achieving anything gives your support a context. It gives it a comfortable place to sit, like an aged relative festering in the comfy chair in the corner and farting in the last ad break of Taggart. Pessimism ensures that you’re not permanently disappointed. Anything else is a bonus. It wasn’t always like that. Young children cling to your hand on the way to the match in the naive expectation that a win today is a real possibility but how quickly that shiny, happy, youthful exuberance loses its glow. Football has a habit of wearing you down, grinding you into a juiceless pulp; in human form it would be a laughing Buddha or the orange Tango man, sitting on your chest, laughing uproariously, jumping up and down, throwing blancmange at passers-by and shouting stuff like ‘but do ya still love me?’
For some of you the very question will beggar belief. Happiness, you’ll say, what the bugger’s it got to do with being happy? When Gordon Ottershaw returns home after every match in which his beloved Barnstoneworth United have lost heavily he ritualistically tosses items of furniture through the front window. On one occasion, sensing there’s been a heavy defeat, his wife even passes him the heavy mantelpiece clock so that he can hurl it through the front window.
There’s no room for happiness in football. That’s how it is. If a list of 92 clubs is told at the start of the season that the one at number 1 at the end will win a trophy, aren’t 91 of them going to be disappointed? And anyway, what is happiness in football, what does it look like? Is happiness a Champions League title or a League Two promotion? Is it a derby day victory, a 9-1 drubbing or a hot pie and the relief of an urgently required piss at the interval? What exactly does it mean to be happy with one’s football club? Are the Barnets, the Burtons, the Morecambes and the Macclesfields delirious with their longed-for league status? Is a visit to Sincil Bank any more enthralling for them than a trip to Stonebridge Road, Ebbsfleet? Will supporters of AFC Wimbledon only be truly happy when they overhaul the MK Dons? Were Spurs any happier to win the League Cup Final than Luton were to win the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy Final? It’s all relative and highly subjective.
Happiness has correlations with social and economic well-being, age, sex, ability to rationalise or reason, religion, health, relationships and so on and so on. Most of us live relatively comfortable lives; as a society we own more stuff, we’re richer and healthier than ever before and we’re living longer, yet researchers say we’re not as happy as we were. Similarly our football league is touted as the best in the world, some of our players ARE the best in the world, league attendances are up, investment is up, TV coverage is up, interest is high, so why are we not the happiest supporters in the world?
I only ask because the question was asked of me during a recent game. I’d met up with an old friend whom I hadn’t seen for years and we were watching the Blades at Pride Park. It was a tense affair (the match, not me and him, obviously) until United killed the game with what turned out to be a Hulse own goal 10 mins from time. So during this tension, just as Monty and Savage are swapping bodily fluids, my mate, a psychology graduate of old, says to me: “Are you happy with the Blades?”
I turn on him with a look which spits derision and loathing. He’s asked a dead-ball question during an open passage of play. Rule 47 of the Harvey spectator handbook specifically states, under the sub-section applying to invited guests, that: “Comments made during open passages of play shall be brief and relevant unless they constitute a moan.” It goes on to say quite categorically: “Above all, there shall be no open-ended questions of a philosophical nature.” I am so astounded by being asked the question while the ball is in motion that I find myself rudely raising a hand in a non-verbal gesture which says simply: ‘wait’.
My mate had apparently been observing me during the match, watching as I fidgeted around my seat. He’d studied my permanently disappointed facial gestures – pursed lips, eyes closed, easier-to-score-than-miss hand drag down the face, thumb and forefinger buried in eye sockets, the wide-eyed astonishment defensive clearance, the one-eye closed free-kicks and then that Les Dawson gurn that I do when I push my bottom lip up to the base of my nose when an oppo’s corner is flicked inches over our crossbar and our defenders look at each other as if to say ‘we did say that one was going to be yours didn’t we’. He’s observed me and now feels qualified to report back, little realising that he’s burning his bridges and will almost certainly never be invited to another game.
I gave his question a trite “yes” in the end without a second thought. But the thing about philosophical questions is that they have a habit of lurking in the corner like the last few baked beans at the bottom of the can. And so, during a subsequent away fixture at Swansea, listening to the commentary of the game on Radio Sheff whilst sitting in the car in the driveway (good reception if I park at just the right angle) and demolishing a packet of Wheat Munchies (bacon flavour), I find myself soul searching.
Happiness . . . I’ve never given it a thought before. Surely it’s irrelevant? Being a supporter of a team is a condition, a state of being; it’s my genetic make-up, my birthright, my time-honoured rite of passage from father to son. Weller says being a Mod is a way of living, he’s lived his life that way and he’ll die a Mod; no compromise. I am a football supporter, like Caine in Kung Fu I walk the earth as a Blade. My dad (Master Po in this analogy although I don’t think he ever truly embraced that role), made me walk across our sandpit without leaving a trace. And then one dark Saturday morning in the park, probably by the knackered climbing frame, he urged me to lift a red hot cauldron with the inside of my forearms. And the next thing I knew I had United burned into my skin, forever to be associated with the club – that’s what happens isn’t it? It’s got bog all to do with happiness!
Football is a pilgrimage, a Canterbury Tale, a knight’s quest for the Holy Grail, a lifelong journey of sacrifice and discovery, suffering the slings and arrows lobbed at us by the fickle finger of fate, a quest for the precious ring with the strange dwarf-like people who sit on trees with arms – a bit like watching Rotherham United perhaps. Asking if you’re happy with your football club is like asking a Protestant, Catholic or a Jew if they’re happy with their faith? It’s simply what they’re born into. I’m United in my faith, Bramall Lane my church and the half-time raffle for a brand new Ka, my collection plate. When we embarked on this journey no one ever promised us a life of unremitting cheerfulness.
Of course it could always be about perception – was that last 1-1 draw two points lost or a point gained? Pyschologists would tell us that we must focus on and accentuate the positive and put all those nasty negatives to the back of our minds. But that’s easy theorising. Watching my own club I am shackled by a memory of a successful era against which all current day iterations of the team are judged. Forest fans, more than any other, have every reason to sit in this camp. How fair is that? I may well die before my team reaches that pinnacle again and even then our pinnacle was just another club’s small hill or mound. Similarly, as Englishmen and women, are we not chained to the wall of a summer’s day in 1966 when we became world champions. Do we not judge all modern versions of the national team by that success? We will only be released from our shackles and truly happy and relaxed watching an England match after we’ve regained that trophy. After that, occasional defeats, to Liechtenstein and Azerbaijan, will be dismissed as mere trifles, laughed off in a jocular fashion, dismissed as irrelevant in pub chatter. We will sneer at the taunts of our European neighbours and languish in the joy of having regained what was supposed to be ours anyway. We invented the game, we shall say, now we can take the ball home.
So whilst waiting for this success, which may never come, how do we cope with the present? How do we get happy?
When I tried to remember the happiest I’d ever been at a game I surprised myself because try as I might, I couldn’t get past a 1979 Blades versus Mansfield Town, Anglo-Scottish round robin tie played in the lazy, dying heat of a summer’s night in front of a crowd of less than 5,000. Bramall Lane was bathed in a golden glow. Capping off a superb day’s lazing around, me and my mate Jamie (still a diehard regular) arrived two hours early and were almost the first to be let in. We had to wait for the shutters on the snackbar to rattle up before taking a pie and a Bovril down onto the Kop. We sat on the steps to listen to the early noises of a ground being prepared for action and laughed when the tannoy bloke coughed his guts up before spluttering into action (aaah the days of non-professional pre-match preparation!). We watched the entire match sitting down, chatting about life, the Universe and every facet of every player’s abilities. We could hear the players slagging each other off as their voices echoed round the corrugated roof of the Kop. It was the most sublime evening’s football I can ever remember. But perhaps, and here’s the significant bit, I can’t remember the score.
A recent piece of research coming out of The University of Nottingham studied the attitudes of National Lottery winners, and concluded that, whilst the money took away stress and worry, what these people valued more than anything else, what made them really happy, was a long hot soak in a bath, a glass of wine or a frothy pint of ale in the pub on a Sunday lunchtime.
Perhaps that’s the point about being happy with your football. Perhaps I’m so focussed on the destination, I’m forgetting to smell the pies along the way, I’m forgetting to enjoy the simple things that make me football happy; the never-ending thrill of waking up on a matchday morning; the moment my expanding middle-aged waistline pushes through the turnstile gate (please don’t ever get rid of turnstiles); the greenness of the grass; the way my daughter subconsciously leans heavily against my side when United struggle to play the ball out of defence as if she’s physically urging the players and the ball forward and the way season ticket holders, whose lives coincide for just 90 minutes a fortnight, can hug each other after a goal like brothers separated at birth.
Or perhaps it’s even simpler than that. I recently watched two be-suited businessmen in a JJB shop unable to resist a sneaky heading game after delving into a large pit of footballs and I thought, maybe, happiness . . . is just a ball.
