CONFESSION OF AN ADDICT

Footballers are overpaid prima donnas, mercenary in the extreme and for the most part having about as much loyalty to their club as the size of their pay package and the transfer market can command. I know all of this and yet must confess to being a ‘fan’, which of course, quite appropriately is shorthand for fanatic.

Admitting to loyalty to a football club in middle age feels a little like admitting to a love of toy train sets or cheap children’s sweets, the latter also being a weakness of mine.

A passion, a life long love affair with a football club is beyond the rational, indeed may represent some sort of ‘disease’ in rather the same way that alcoholism is a disease, once infected there is no cure, you learn to live with it.

The idea that being a supporter of a team involves some kind of pleasurable leisure activity is to completely misunderstand the nature of the beast, for the most part it involves constant anxiety, despondency at miserable results, anger at poor performances or seeming lack of commitment, despair at managerial decisions or blatantly missed opportunities. However amongst all this moments of incredible joy, bordering on ecstasy, the last minute goal that seals victory, the toppling of so called giant sides, the displays of artistry that rightly deserve the term ‘the beautiful game!’ Such moments seem to make it all more than worth while and in the punching of the air and dance around the room you can hear the soft whisper that you are hooked.

So I am an Evertonian, this tribal loyalty superseding much more rational solidarities. Trotsky once observed that there would never be a revolution in Britain as the masses were too obsessed by football which siphoned off the passions that otherwise would be channelled into politics and revolution. It is difficult not to be convinced that he was right. For years I tried to put football into its proper perspective and throw all of my passion into political action, but in seconds on hearing a Liverpool supporter deriding Everton the old tribal loyalty would flare up and I would find these buried passions re-ignite.

So yesterday the Premier league season commenced again. Imbibing that heady cocktail that presents itself at the start of every new season, a mixture of intense hope, anxiety, feelings of powerlessness and desire for success, physically willing the side on, only for ‘us’ to crash to a 1-0 defeat compounded by a poor performance. I slink to bed depressed with the heart heavy with the emotion that only a football supporter can know, here we go again.

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