FOOTY FANS!!! Don'tcha just LUV 'em!!!!
By
Mickey Blue Eyes.

Film and photography overtook painting and sculpture as the main arts representational form at about the turn of the nineteenth century. There, that's put the betting shop into a whole new perspective.

Which is why it is well worth viewing the opening sequence to a movie titled "Contact" starring Jodie Foster. The film is designed to make you feel small - but part of a unique, indecipherable and much larger coda. It succeeds rather well. If you don't get the point you aren't breathing properly.

Which is also why you should feel sensibly about the home game V Spurs this season.

It was late in the home league debut of sixteen-years old Wayne Rooney, The Duke. A superb shot of his had been brilliantly saved. He had laid on a goal for Stubbsy only for it to go begging. He had had a good if unspectacular game, a really promising debut. Understandably he got tired. At which point he came up against one of Tottenham's two giant centre backs, both playing magnificently. He lost a heading duel. Behind me in the Lower Street End some braindead divvy shouted, "Rooney! You're too small!"

Thing is - no shit - he meant to be taken deadly serious. You could tell by the tone in his voice. It was so stupid you couldn't even be bothered to shake your head in wonderment. You know the kind of thing. You must have heard something like it yourself.

Battle-hardened fans, loyalty scarred by the last five years, just sat and stared at each other. Eventually someone said world-wearily, "I think I'll just go and batter the fuck outa that thick twat." Then someone else said, "Nah. I wouldn't bother. He wouldn't feel a thing." You couldn't help but agree with both statements.

Now, like you, I am willing to concede it takes all sorts. But there are limits. There always are. And some people don't even want to know where they are, let alone pay some kind of regard thereto. Some people just don't know when to stop. They're far too concerned with their own "sensitivity." You can safely wager this means their own self-pity, even narcissism. For them, everyone else is wrong.

Well, it's a relatively free society we live in. They're entitled to their viewpoint, especially if they have paid over twenty quid for it. But so am I. Therefore, dickheads are free-range targets for my opinions.

First, let's get one thing straight. There are vastly more sensible fans than stupid ones. Moreover you have to sort out the temporarily insane from the permanent coprolite-for-brains you sometimes find seated within handy expletive distance. Anybody who labels an entire crowd on the basis of a narrow experience is as stupid as the people he's trying to label. This simply won't do. We have to use our common sense.

We have to apply that too to the empty-headed nincompoops who try to tell us Goodison is "full of racists," which it patently isn't. One racist is one too many. But we won't rid ourselves of these tiny-minority amoeba by throwing mud all over our own fans. That too sounds like the kind of self-righteous arse-head you can find too many of in any suburban Residents Association or in the letters column of the Daily Mail. Or, worst of all, in your standard assembly of anodyne pinkies. We need to make people alert and ready to deal, not batter them with the kind of muck you associate with the Sun or the Daily Telegraph.

The same kind of no-mark would probably accept a £2,000 bribe from the tabloids if offered. In fact I know one local who has done just that, and who keeps railing on about our fans and personalities in the game as though he had something special to offer. Er, no, not really. Anyone can, and does, pretend that inside information constitutes some kind of wisdom. It wouldn't take much for me to blow the gnome from under his toadstool if I was so inclined. But that would make me as bad as him.

For another vaguely related instance I don't think I have laughed harder than one immortal occasion on a local less-than-good radio quiz programme overheard on the car radio. The host asked the Wavertree contestant what was Hitler's first name. Back came the deliberate instant answer "Heil!", scouse piss-take tone to the fore. The car nearly ended up in a ditch. Sure enough, the next day's phone-in was full of unrepresentative jellyfish from the rates-paying suburbs asking why such stupid people were allowed on the show and Wasn't It Demeaning For Our City.

Oh well.

Thus, the same "Evertonian" nincompoops who tell us they hate Goodison. Actually, they almost certainly hate themselves. GP is a convenient bolt-hole for their inadequacies. The rest of us are far too busy supporting our club as best we can, in our own imperfect way.

Not much difference, then, between the nincompoops and the jellyfish.

The more you broaden your view of fans' behaviour, the more it is like viewing the universe through the Hubble telescope. Gosh, but that's a mighty large INFINITY out there, friends. Just when you figure you have your declaration firmly nailed to the church door, along comes yet another new sect and rips it up. You have to start all over again. Shakespeare called it "…………the passing parade…………" How true. He would have approved hugely of "Contact."

It is also true human behaviour can be oppressingly predictable. But, as Koestler pointed out long ago, only up to a point. Every totalitarian society is destroyed by eventual reaction. The methods of getting rid vary. Time is the best attrition of all. It is almost in accordance with Newton: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Had he been born on old Scotty Road he might have added: sooner or later, la.

So those who have contempt for the human species have a lot of explaining to do to themselves, similarly those who attack all footy fans with a verbal scatter gun. So don't confuse me with those arse-holes. I'm far too busy smiling at the absurdity of human nature and how it manifests in The Beautiful Game.

Therefore I am going to go against everything I have just written and generalise as loonily as your average acne-ridden, tabloid-bribed dwarf. You don't like it? Hell, I couldn't give a shit. It passes the time between matches.

Basically, there are seven kinds of footy fan. It is no coincidence there are Seven Ages of Man, there are Seven Deadly Sins, there are Seven Seas, there are Seven Hills of Rome, and the European Community started out with seven nations. And so on. There is a smooth symmetry here.

The most widespread one is YOU. Yes, that's right, you yourself. You are not stupid. You know the game. You take all facts into account. You are honest, open-minded, decent and fair to the opposition. You recognise your own moods. You never offer unfair criticism. You have a superb, ironic sense of humour. You can laugh at yourself at all times and never take yourself too seriously. You know it is only a game. You dislike personality cults, the media and Big Business sticking its corrupt nose into The Beautiful Game. You like a drink and even occasionally go to the game a bit worse for wear but you never insult anyone, least of all players, owners and managers. You are a true internationalist. You are not a racist and never say anything remotely racist. In fact you want all racists securely locked away for ever. You don't like the media because they are a bucketful of vicarious slimy leeches with absolutely no conscience and no regard for anything except themselves. You have only your club's best interests at heart. You are the very heart and soul of loyalty. You encourage kids to take a healthy interest in the game, to reach for personal excellence and understanding of teamwork. Quite rightly you regard footy as the greatest game in the world. You will do anything to help anyone at any time. You are of course an ecotmorph intellectual.

The opposite of You is the DETERMINED MISERY-ARSE, the DMA. We all know at least one of these though we avoid their company like the plague. It's like being next to an itinerant funeral. This is the kind of benighted personality who carries the terrible burden of disappointment in life and tries to offload it on the rest of humanity, us. For this kind of "fan," footy is merely a melancholic vehicle. DMAs are joyless, spiritless loons with a penchant for trying to urinate all over your sensible optimism. In fact they home in on optimism like an o-seeking ground-to-ground missile. If you're unfortunate enough to get into conversation with one of them you will find it trés difficile to avoid suicide as a viable option. It's like listening to Leonard Cohen "sing." They are usually habitual escapist drunks, fat suburbanites, tory voters, drug addicts, computer nerds, cheap salesmen, Daily Telegraph readers or unskilled van drivers from Essex or Warrington. There is nothing to be done with them except hit them on the head every ten seconds with a sock full of lead. It really IS the only thing they understand. Even then they'll claim all the socks in the world are against them. DMAs are endomorphs to a man and woman. They all have the face of a soundly smacked arse. For them, genuine humour is an other-person experience. If we were top of the league you would likely find them muttering, "Ah yes, but, did you know………………………" and then going off into one of their tiresome diatribes of wittering, poisoned gossip.

Then there's the DOGMATIC LIBERAL, the DL. You can spot these a kilometre off. Their face radiates a sort of fanatical fairness. They are all things to all men, an eternal referee in the game of life. And as we all know, anyone with a smattering of psychological training or DL instincts can get between two opinions and appear reasonable, especially to themselves. Which might be the whole point of their existence. That's the thing I have against DLs, they long ago persuaded themselves that everyone else is, well, not really reasonable and if only humanity would listen they might learn something. By definition everyone else is an extremist to a DL. For instance, if you are perfectly justifiably on your feet effing and blinding at a ref's obviously corrupt decision-making against your innocent team, you'll find a DL tugging at your elbow saying, "I think you missed that bit where…………………" DLs are rightly regarded as a bit wet and unreliable when the chips are down. Instinctively you feel you wouldn't want one of them with you in a trench with a division of Vietcong about to launch a wave attack. Being a DL is almost always the safest position because they can slip sideways into either camp at any give moment. No, they are not to be trusted. They are the last thing you need when you're having an enjoyable heated row with a standard idiot pinky and doing your duty by mashing him into a smooth paste with your withering scorn of his loony conveyor belt self-delusion.

And of course the opposite of the DL is the TOTALLY COMMITTED FAN, the TCN. This type can be a source of wonderment and concern. I mean, you have to be concerned for somebody whose whole life revolves around football. This is something which would never occur to us Yous. Our lives are too full and interesting. After all, footy's only a game. But TCNs don't see it that way. For them, Football Is A Way Of Life. And it has to be admitted that if it's done peaceably, what is so wrong with a harmless obsession? Yes, okay, admittedly your eyes are going to get instantly blood-shot if you find yourself getting battered by a TCN with stats and lists of one sort or another. The difficulties start when they can't see any further than their own obsession. At which point even the gentlest of piss-takes is likely to be taken as a mortal insult. I am unable to take seriously anyone who says, "Insult my team and you insult me." I am just as likely to respond to the little divil in all of us with a, "Well, in that case, your team is the biggest load of bollocks since Schwarznegger's last movie, or appointed "president" Shrub's last speech, or fat slob Johnny Vegas's last "joke." "

Recent years have seen the advent of the BEAN-COUNTER, the BC. There's a sad inevitability about the coming of these antiseptic, heartless bastards. Once we started filling our society with overpaid accountants and carpet-baggers talking utter esoteric claptrap it was only a matter of time before they found their way into footy. Well, here they are, right on time, waving their cash flows and balance sheets and justifying the existence of ugly entities like Ken fucking Bates, Rupert cunting Murdoch, Rick twatting Parry, Silvio nazi Berlusconi, Peter shitty Ridsdale, as well as Enron, BCCI, Allied Irish Bank, Marconi and any other infamous rip-off you care to recall. Even ordinary fans have got into the crap jargon about "revenue streams" and "market branding." D'you know, I never thought I'd see the day when young people thought it "cool" to spout accountancy drivel. Whatever happened to feeling good about being young enough to know the truth? One of the indicators, and we should have known at the time, was the arrival of John Major. He's the only individual on record who ran away from the circus to become a fucking accountant. And don't think I'm kidding. I'm convinced he was born at the age of forty-eight and hasn't aged since. All BCs are like that. Never forget, friends, there are three sexes: male, female and chartered accountant.

Close on the heels of the BC comes the LONG DISTANCE GLORY HUNTER, the LDGH. Now the really funny thing about LDGHs is absolutely nobody ever admits to being one. Yet the entire world knows perfectly well that, for a start, all Manc United fans and pinkies are LDGHs. So how can this be? After all, you can't miss them because they have a permanent club carrier-bag in their hands and the look of a clubber with a tub of Es inside them. We all know it's full of useless, over-priced muck manufactured in some Far East sweat shop. But LDGHs consider it imperative to cover anything and everything, even their kids, in the kind of kunsthaus trash Damien Hirst makes a living out of. They almost always originate in places like Leamington Spa, Romford, Wirral, Leatherhead, Warrington, Exeter or somewhere adjacent to the White Cliffs of Dover. What is it drives your average "Manc" to travel up from Cornwall or your loony pinky to troll in from Norway or Ballymena? The answer of course is that they yearn to belong to something, anything, which carries a sense of identity, of belonging, something outside their day-to-day experience. But the objective must look like it will deliver or there's no sense attaching to it. Hence the "glory" bit. Distance doesn't matter much these days if you are working and determined to fill your spare time. On the basis of the more the merrier I don't have much problem with LDGHs but I can understand those that do. The game's origins are community-based, which is no bad thing. It only goes awry when resentful locals are deprived of access to a club they want to support. For me this whole thing crystallised hysterically in Kuwait. Amongst my friends were a "Manc" with a broad cockney accent and a "Gunner" with a broad Lancashire accent. Occasionally I couldn't resist setting them at each other's throat and listening to their mad rationale. Of course there IS no genuine rationale, not unless you've cracked the secret of human nature. And if you've managed THAT what the hell are you doing reading this?

Finally, there's the RETIRED GOONS, the RGs. Fortunately, these are a dying breed. They are the pensionable survivors of the unlamented seventies and eighties, retired hooligans kept going by the memory of scarves tied to wrists, Doc Martens boots and Plod's heaviest batons caving in a cranium or two. It's difficult to hold a dialogue with these tosspots because almost all of them are King of the Kids. They don't talk with you, they bellow AT you. Gawd help you if they're full of lager at the time. It's like facing into a force 8 gale of halitosis. RGs are notable for their inability to acknowledge any existence other than their own. They are an evolutionary anachronism on a par with your appendix, and sometimes just as painful. Equally, they should be removed just as clinically. For all their alleged anti-establishment attitude most of them would make ideal SS members. Such organisations have narrow intellectual requirements but a high automatic obedience ratio, not unlike the Conservative and Unionist Party or "new" Labour. You can't sit in their company for more than two minutes before you get force-fed a load of old codswallop about how their "firm" took on five thousand screaming Millwall fans in the Battle Of Cold Blow Lane in 1893. RGs have only one saving grace, and that is their imminent demise. The sooner the better.

So there you have it, a comprehensively researched analysis of what makes all fans tick. As I said, it takes all sorts.

The really encouraging thing in all this is that the Yous, you and I, are easily in the ascendancy. We know how to watch a game and how to behave ourselves, how to appreciate great players whoever they play for and how to stay loyal in extreme adversity. There's nothing smug about us, no sir. The meek will inherit the earth. And don't we fucking know it. (12/09/02)