Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 9 May 2013

9 May 2013

It was before the alleged assault on Dayle Southwell last weekend that I thought it. The Southwell thing just confirmed it.

I've been feeling it for ages, really, if I'm honest. But only quite recently have I found a way of articulating that feeling.

Here's what it is.

If I hadn't become a Town fan when I was little, there's no way I'd get into football now.

Before we go any further, let me say this: your original/regular Diary isn't going to jump on that 'Against Modern Football' bandwagon. True, the AMF movement makes many valid points about the corporate pillage of our game. Football is too expensive, and if money is the lifeblood of the game than much of the money paid by fans is sucked up by various parasitic bastards in suits: from the agents and 'advisors' to the 'investors' and carpetbaggers. The Premier League has severely damaged the competitive balance of the English game and the latest changes to its 'parachute payment' system threaten to destroy it altogether.

But AMF throws out the baby with the bathwater. It's not friendship scarves that bother me about modern football. It's not all-seater stadiums, or players having Twitter accounts. It's not even fans with prawn sandwiches: the supposed gentrification of football is a metropolitan thing. Even a tray of chips is probably deemed too much like health food to make it onto the menu at the kiosks inside Blundell Park.

No, scratch the surface of AMF and you find an ugly, reactionary nostalgia for the days when men were men and attacked each other outside football grounds in large, Stanley knife-wielding gangs, in between admiring each other's nice clothes. Women, of course, were nowhere to be seen.

So what is it that boils my piss most about modern football? It's the sense of entitlement. It's all the fucking endless moaning, every day of every week, that My Club FC should be higher up the league because, um, stuff. That My Club's current status is 'unacceptable' so we should sack the manager, regardless of whether or not such an action is likely to improve or degrade that status. That we're not like other clubs: we're better, because, um, er... things, probably we're really good fans or something from 30 years ago, or something else that every other set of fans in the country will claim with equal vehemence, so we deserve everything and we deserve it now, and if we don't get it we'll scream and scream until we're sick.

But what does this have to do with the alleged attack on Dayle Southwell last weekend? Am I implying some connection between this sense of entitlement and the possibility that a footballer might be assaulted by a supporter after a team finishes fourth in its league?

Well, actually, yes, I am. This may just be extrapolating from Middle-Aged Diary's reflections here on Tuesday. But if you go around thinking you're 'too big' for this 'tinpot' league, and you 'have to get out' of it, you can work yourself up into a right old state. You can get angry about things you shouldn't really get angry about. If you feel frustrated because you think your club is in too low a league, then of course it doesn't follow that you will headbutt a footballer for failing to win promotion. But if you headbutt a footballer for failing to win promotion, it's pretty certain you feel frustrated because you think your club is in too low a league. These are two points on a scale, not two different scales.

There it is, then. I've got to the bottom of this loathing I feel for modern football. So what will I do with this loathing? I dunno. I'm not going anywhere. However pissed off I get with what the game has become, I'll always be a Town fan. I've got my memories to keep me warm at night. Promotions and great cup victories, sure. But memories from a time when, in the absence of promotions and great cup victories, we stayed cool. We lost a match, sighed and perhaps muttered darkly a little. We didn't scream abuse. We didn't headbutt anyone. We didn't dream of calling for a manager to be sacked, unless he was Mike Lyons. And we went to the match again the next week and we just kept on going.

The next generation of fans, however, won't have those memories of GTFC. And what worries me most is that GTFC won't have the next generation of fans.