Football Focus

[SimonM]

Yes be bold Matthewundeuxtrois! If I can confess a lifelong Sheffield United habit then I really see no good reason why you should avoid the sneers and brickbats of all these Premier elitists hereabouts!:)) Hell there's even some Leeds supporters around somewhere....well there were...erm..

[matthew123]

Okay, my club is Liverpool, if that makes any difference.

[Sandperson]

And suddenly everything becomes clear....

It's a relief to be honest. I don't have to come up with any new material I've honed it all on Keef and Anna. ;-)

[Annasfield]

Have been thinking about the struggling to get tickets comments from the previous page.

If you think that getting tickets to a premiership match for any of the big 4 is particularly easy then you must be living in la la land. However, t annoys me when people use that as a reason for not going. If you want them badly enough you can get them and I mean at cost value from the club.

Irrespective of finances or significant others (which is a choice people make), the more you go, or the more you associate yourself with the club the more people you meet who can sort you for tickets.

Sorry if that offends or grates on anyone.

[????]

So how many people here support the club they were born nearest too? I dunno how these things should be measured but I'm immediately suspicious of Man u, Liverpool and Arsenal fans ( plus Leeds fans in their late 40s and Chelsea fans under 30) I support a team that my great grandad did and is part of my blood and genuinely feel, in football terms, morally superior to most middle class football fans I meet - logical, rational, sensible? Nah. Pathetic? Old fashioned? sentimental? maybe but it's how those of us old school fans tend to feel.....

[????]

Though if it's been 300 yards further south it would have been the scum ::o

[Sharon_H]

???? Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> So how many people here support the club they were

> born nearest too? I dunno how these things should

> be measured but I'm immediately suspicious of Man

> u, Liverpool and Arsenal fans ( plus Leeds fans in

> their late 40s and Chelsea fans under 30) I

> support a team that my great grandad did and is

> part of my blood and genuinely feel, in football

> terms, morally superior to most middle class

> football fans I meet - logical, rational,

> sensible? Nah. Pathetic? Old fashioned?

> sentimental? maybe but it's how those of us old

> school fans tend to feel.....

Well I do for a start, walking distance from Anfield, cut my football teeth in the Boys Pen many, many years ago.

I don't go that much now, only once this season, West Ham a couple of weeks ago. Came back with a stinker of a cold or is it manflu?

[Keef]

I didn't get in to football really properly til I was living in Liverpool, would've been odd to then announce I supported Palace or Millwall. I'm not middle class though so doesn't matter ;-)

[Annasfield]

My Mum's family are scousers - just did what my cousin Jon did and remember his pictures of Rush on his bedroom walls. His brother Paul is an Evertonian, so I guess that as red was my favourite colour I was quite lucky there.

Sharon - did you get West Ham on your fancard? It's one of the pre-req' games for the derby.

[Sharon_H]

Anna, no, mates got them for us.

Forgot to ask , Anna are you going to the Derby?

[matthew123]

I was on the train earlier this season returning from Anfield when there was a group of about 9 drunken geriatrics supporting Coventry and Wolves. They decided to pick on 2 lads in their twenties from Essex, as why don't they support their local club and not Liverpool. Anyway it ended up with one of the 50 year old slobs grabbing the Liverpool fan by the throat when the "banter" got out of hand.

Why shouldn't kids be able to decide to pick a team that is successful and then stick with them if it turns out to be their kind of club, through thick and thin, rather than having to pick the team at the bottom of their garden. Even Bill Shankly said that if Everton were playing at the bottom of his garden, he'd have drawn the curtains ;-)

The old boys later tried the same aggressive argument with myself and a few others in next carriage. I asked them whether they'd have been die hard Man U fans, if by accident of birth, they'd been born outside Old Trafford.. they said Yes. Which way is the right way I'm not entirely sure.. but none of them volunteered to explain why they were all heading back to London rather than returning to the Midlands to uphold and support their local communities and economy.

Old and young made their decision on who to support and where to live - it's called freedom B)

[Annasfield]

Oh that's a shame.

Yep. Having a bit of a silly season as I usually ski, but this winter I can't due to knee surgery. Have decided to get in debt going to every match possible rather than spending it in the mountains. So far so good (tu)

[Mr Django Wisteria]

Talking of supporting the local talent...how are Dulwich Hamlet doing this season, anybody know?

[mockney piers]

As per usual, very promising pre-season, then revert to a bit of hoofing, improve, erratic results leaving us mid-table.

Next will either come a flirtation with relegation with an uneasy but comfortable finish, or an unsuccessful flirtation with the play-offs, and occasionally both.

[lard]

People can support whoever they like, it makes no odds to me. But if you support a team from somewhere different to where you grew up/family were or are then I do think you miss out on a lot of what supporting a team and going to the match is all about.

Different areas have different mentalities due to the history and circumstances of that particular area. Your average Arsenal fan previously was different to your average Liverpool fan because London and Liverpool are different...socially, economically etc.

Personally, the actual football is only a part of going to the match and supporting a team. It's more about the whole experience, and for it to be 100% you have to know the area and the banter. For example, someone from Essex probably doesn't even understand thick scouse, nevermind know why something someone says is funny.

But the premiership era has changed it all quite a lot anyway. With football being on the telly much more, it is much easier for people to have a passing interest in it all. It's almost too easy to follow a team now.

But each to their own I guess. It's like anything, people get out of it what they want and it is a personal thing.

[SeanMacGabhann]

bugger - I had written a longish post and the I read lard's post and that was pretty true and cancels some if mine out - but as I've gone to the trouble here it is anyway:

-----

Even Sean "sits on the fence apparently" declared his allegiance early on this thread

Re: supporting who you grow up near verus choosing - I veer towards the former but I wasn't even born in this country so does that mean I can't support a team? I can say that growing up in rural Ireland in the 70s was in many ways fairly miserable (although we are far away from Angela's Ashes territory here) so the "glamour" of English football was not to be sniffed at. my early allegiance to Arsenal stems, as I've said on here before, from them having well over half a team or Irish players, plus an Irish manager. Seemed pretty logical to me (although most other kids I knew plumped for Liverpool first, then Man U) I don't think I was even that aware of their history or relative success for a couple of years

I lived in East Ham for 4 years. I met and knew several Hammers fans - some were top blokes and more than some were dodgy. When they weren't trying to sell me hooky gear they were complaining about the ethnic make-up of the area etc etc. But you know the sort, they had charisma. But to my mind their allegiance to their club was almost an affliction rather than something to be proud of - they would justify almost any misdeed by returning to "roots", "being a proper supporter etc" - I just felt glad I didn't have to put up with that growing up so I could better bond with a club. I'm not picking out West Ham for any other reason than it was the only time I lived close enough to a ground to be part of the local community - I'm sure it's similar story in any other club

Back to Arsenal - I stopped going to games not because of overpaid teenagers on the pitch, but because of idiots in the crowd. If it wasn't the Tim nice-but-dim fans who spent the whole time telling everyone to sit down, it was the thugs yelling and singing abuse beyond any reasonable boundary. The ones you know don't "release all their tensions" at a game but live their whole life in some sort of put-upon-it-was-the-ref/government/taxman-wot-done-it mental siege

That's not meant to suggest they made up the majority of the crowd, but enough of them existed in all parts of the ground to make me wonder why I bothered spending money I didn't have, to go there

I've watched football in every town I have lived - Cork, Exeter, Swindon, Dulwich as well as the Arsenal - so I don't think I'm just a glory-hunter. I love the game.. just less than I used to

[????]

Alliegance to West Ham is an affliction Sean believe me ;-)

[SeanMacGabhann]

well judging by what it's done to you and Mockney.. ;-)

I remember at the time I was in East Ham, we met you something like for or 5 times in one season. Those were uncomfortable games to watch in the local pubs I can tell you

[mockney piers]

I was living in East Finchley at the time, so I know how you felt!!

And it is a curse, I can't believe my brother has decked out the room for the forthcoming nephew/niece* in claret and blue, child cruelty I tell ya!!

*is there a word that covers both?

[DaveR]

All this business about how 'real' you are as a fan is just boring - we all like to poke fun at glory hunters and late adopters but that's all it is - a bit of fun. I was born in Ipswich, and I support Town, but that's only because my dad and my grandad were fans who went to a lot of games and started taking me when I was a kid - a fair few other local kids supported Liverpool* (it was the 1970s). It's not offensive to sneer at other people based on the extent to which they "associate" themselves with their club, but it's pretty sad.

*although Ipswich has a huge amount of local loyalty - you see far fewer Premiership club shirts around the town than in many other similar places. Or maybe it's just lack of imagination.

[mockney piers]

"you see far fewer Premiership club shirts around the town than in many other similar places"

Once steam travel comes to Ipswich that will all change, you mark my words.

[Keef]

Bristol is mainly made up of City and Rovers fans, don't see a lot of prem shirts down there.

[ratty]

I was born in St Mary's Hospital in Fratton. If you look out the window of the room I was born in you can see Fratton Park. PTID!

?24m for Diarra! KEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRCCCCCHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!! No sell on clause from Arsenal either!!! DOH!

[Jah Lush]

That's one who isn't coming to Spurs then ratty.

[ratty]

Aye - pleased that we are not selling to a prem club to be honest. He is a cracking player though and gutted to see him go but we were never going to hang on to him. He is pure Champions League class!