F*#k 'em off!
Sun, Mar 15th 2009, 15:55
This weekend I attended a football match. This is only the second match I've ever been to in person. The first was Aston Villa versus Sunderland one miserable, cold rainy day about ten years ago (Villa won one nil with a goal from England defender Gareth Southgate, but it was a big yawn). This second was Wolves versus Charlton at Molynewinewinewinew stadium.
It is an interesting experience, from a culturally objective perspective. I'm not really that fussed about football. The only team I really 'support' is England. I can't get excited about league games. It all seems rather pointless. But hey 26,000 other people disagreed with me and turned up to watch top-of-the-Championship Wolves shakily beat off Charlton 2 - 1.
Or in the parlance of the fanatic who stood in front of me... they "F*#ked Them Off". The fan fanatic was every inch the classic image of a football nut. He was mid to late twenties, skinny and wiry, sported a dark blue nylon tracksuit, had close cropped hair with wet look gel and wore a signet ring that was large enough to blot out the sun.
He was compelling to watch. More compelling than the game in fact. We were in and amongst a relatively quiet bunch of spectators (who by the way were about 90% male), but he made up for it. Any chants within a five mile radius were immediately picked up by this guy. This would be accompanied by a new dangerous martial art, which I can only describe as the Wayward Fist of Dangerous Clapping. There's a lot of elbow action in this martial art.
It is almost as dangerous as another arm technique, which I hereby name the Flying V. The Flying V is only to be used in moments of extreme fan-based-stress or support. The ref cards one of your players. An opposition player falls badly to the ground. You get the picture. At this moment, you must leap in the air, or if seated, leap from your seat, throw your arms up and out into a V. This technique is guaranteed to ward off any evil spirits and possibly result in your nearest neighbours developing broken noses.
Another intriguing feature of the game is the 'advice' given by the fans to the players. Things like 'get it in the box' and 'get it in the middle'. Perhaps for variation they could have tried other helpful nuggets such as 'kick the ball' and 'score a goal'.
I'm reasonably sure that the professional footballers probably know more about tactics than John Bull stood in the stand. But who knows, perhaps this will start happening in other professions? Perhaps very soon I'll have David Beckham round at my house giving me useful hints on writing such as 'type some words' and 'make up a story'.
This wasn't the extent of the 'advice' though. Other helpful hints included 'skin him', 'cripple him', the unspecified 'get him' and the worrying 'kill him'. Fortunately the footballers decided, on balance, to just play football.
Then there's the language. For the most part I thought the language at the Wolves game was much more tame than the one I attended at Villa Park some years ago. However, this time I learned a great new phrase which was 'F*#k 'em off!' occasionally clarified by 'F*#k 'em off the pitch!'
Our fan fanatic loved this one, and would repeat it over and over, standing in full Flying V stance, while swaying his whole torso back and forth like some fundamentalist zealot. 'F*#k 'em off! F*#k 'em off! F*#k 'em off the pitch!'
Part of me couldn't help but wonder if this was an instruction meant in the same vein as 'get it in the middle' - an instruction to be taken literally. Surely this fine young gentlemen wasn't asking his squad to literally bugger the Charlton eleven until they were outside the boundaries of the pitch? Maybe. Maybe not.
Even more intriguing was the fact that the fanatic had brought his girlfriend with him. She was actually rather pretty, in itself rather surprising considering the look he was working. Even more confounding was the way she looked at him after one of his blue bouts of rant-chant, body-swaying... as if to say, 'Yes. This is the man for me.'
All in all, it was an entertaining experience. There's more I could write about the problems of freezing feet, pretending to be enthusiastic about a team you don't give two hoots about, and chants meant to bully fellow supporters into standing up, but let's just let those lie.
I have to say my favourtie thing of the whole match was the pre-match and half-time entertainment which was about 30 kids from a primary school playing Taiko drums. It was both simultaneously cute and threatening. Imagine the urchins in Oliver suddenly coming together to do the haka and you have the correct mental picture.
