pauldominic
Well-Known Member
Prestwich_Blue said:
He also wrote this article. It certainly sums me up emotionally: -
You would have to be off your rocker to be a Manchester City fan. Anybody thinking of supporting a Manchester club in recent decades would have done far better to plump for the Reds.
United have a more storied history (as Sir Alex Ferguson pointed out, rather cruelly, on Sunday) and, until very recently, an infinitely brighter future. So, why would any sane person look any farther than Old Trafford?
But that is the thing about football allegiances: they are not determined by the conventions of consumer psychology. Choosing a football club is not like choosing a soap powder or a brand of razor. You do not plump for the easy or even the sensible choice. Indeed, the reasons fans give for their allegiance often seem almost provocatively irrational when set against the lifetime of devotion that they entail.
“I support Spurs because my favourite uncle did.” “I support Brentford because Griffin Park was the first ground at which I watched a live match.” “I support Manchester City because I am a masochist and really fancied half a century of anguish.” (As one fan told me yesterday with a knowing smile on his face.)
And sometimes, there is no choice at all. In Far Foreign Land, his heartfelt ode to Liverpool, Tony Evans, the Football Editor of The Times, writes: “There are people who contend that the state of obsession that many of us exist with is an affectation, a lifestyle choice. It’s not. Right from the beginning, from the first moment that my consciousness registered as a memory, I’ve known that it is a part of my being. And it can skew the way you look at life.”
Perhaps nobody has given us a more evocative analysis of fandom than Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch. It is a book in which Hornby turns his gaze deep within to grapple with the impenetrable mysteries of his own fanaticism. “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women,” he writes. “Suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”
The notion that pain, or, at the very least, angst, is the conventional inner state of a diehard supporter is well documented, and it explains some otherwise mysterious assertions. A friend who supports Chelsea told me that, as he took his seat to watch the first leg of the Champions League semi-final against Barcelona at Stamford Bridge, he hoped for an early goal for the Spaniards. “I was just too tense,” he said. “At least if Barça knocked one in early, I could relax, knowing that it was all over.”
These paradoxes often seem bewildering to those not afflicted with the football disease. But they are legion. In one of the match reports of City’s trophy-clinching triumph on Sunday afternoon, it was revealed how one group of their fans, sitting in front of the press box, left the stadium just a few minutes before the epic denouement. Did they care so little that they could not wait to see if City would turn it around? Of course not. The problem was that they cared too much.
When fans turn away, close their eyes, leave the stadium, and so on, I am often reminded of parents watching their children play competitive sport.
For many it is just too emotionally draining, too attritional. They are so personally involved in what is happening that they cannot bear to sit on the sidelines, powerless. At certain stages of the match at the Etihad Stadium on Sunday, you could almost imagine the fans invading the pitch to force the ball into the Queens Park Rangers net by sheer dint of numbers. Instead they sat in growing anguish. No wonder that some left early.
Those who do not really get football will have watched the highlights on the news, or perhaps the celebrations on Monday evening, and wondered at how a simple game could reach so deep into the soul of a community. But football is more than a game. Even for those of us who love other sports, it is easy to acknowledge that football is in a different league altogether, both in its spectacle and its basic anthropology.
For Evans, Hornby and millions more, it is an obsession; a facet of identity; a reason to be gripped with angst and, very occasionally, with the glorious, incontinent joy that was witnessed on Sunday afternoon as thousands of City fans leapt the perimeter advertising and ran hither and thither in a state of unabashed ecstasy. In what other forum, sporting or cultural, do we see such an mass outpouring?
The illogicality of fandom is, of course, part of its power. That a City supporter cannot rationally justify why he supports the Blues rather than the Reds, or that an Anfield devotee cannot logically infer that Liverpool are, when all is said and done, a more worthy team to follow than Tranmere Rovers, imbues fandom with an emotional significance that other forms of allegiance cannot begin to match. In that sense, football (in a profound way) is like religion.
For fans of City, it has been an interminable wait. Many older supporters have become so accustomed to the cruel irony of living with disappointment next to glorious neighbours that it has spawned its own literature. Manchester United Ruined My Life, a lyrical memoir by Colin Shindler, a Jewish boy growing up as a Blue in the shadow of Old Trafford, is one of a host of bittersweet autobiographies. “I wanted them to win every match and I was devastated when they didn’t,” Shindler writes.
He was devastated rather a lot.
The liturgy of fandom also acknowledges this essential pain, and many of the most satirical chants in recent years have been consciously self-mocking. The City classic: “Macclesfield Town, are you watching?”, chanted as their own team were being relegated to the same division as their Cheshire neighbours, remains one of the most bitingly funny as well as one of the most poignant in the genre.
But without pain, there can be no pleasure, as C. S. Lewis has often observed.
To comprehend the release of euphoria on Sunday afternoon, you first have to understand the 44-year incubation period. Four decades of anguish were the prerequisite for a release so volcanic that neutrals watching on the telly in their thousands will have cracked a smile, perhaps even a chuckle, in empathy. Truly, it was one of the most astonishing afternoons of sport in living memory.
The Times managed to track down one of the supporters who left the Etihad Stadium early and heard the news of Sergio Agüero’s winner on the radio while driving through Manchester. He had left with six members of his family because none of them could stand it any longer as the clock ticked down.
“We got home in time to see the trophy being lifted on television,” he said. “That saved it for us. My dad was there crying his eyes out. He’s 67, a City fan all his life. He’s crying, my mum’s giving him a hug. I was surrounded by all the people that matter most to me, so I can’t complain.”
For sports fans, Sunday afternoon was one of the greatest days in the history of football. But for City fans, many of them, it was one of the greatest days in life.<br /><br />-- Tue May 15, 2012 10:10 pm --<br /><br />
carlos92 said:
Oh lord that takes me back. Thanks for the memories.