Article
Breaking up is hard to do....
The most stress you will experience in football is not the penalty shoot-out of a Champions League Final. Nor is it those dying seconds of the final match of the season when only victory will save you from relegation and humiliation.
It is not even the morning of the new campaign when you wake up and remember you were relegated and there is not a single fixture that looks remotely glamorous.
The Stress Point of the football fan is being felt right now. Rumour, speculation, Telephoto lenses, hurtful headlines, weekly wages, transfer budgets and, worst of all, the real deals all serve to make the summer, quite simply, horrid.
It would be gut wrenching to sit down in a bar and take the hand of your girlfriend and tell her you love her only for her to say: “Ah, well, Simon over there he’s got a new flat with a Jacuzzi and an ice cream maker so I’m leaving you for him. I mean, I’ve got to think about my holidays in Europe.
You only ever take me to Manchester. Europe and ice cream are very important to me.” But for the football fan it is much, much worse. A jilted lover can choose a replacement or wallow in self pity. A football fan has to try to love someone else, that they have not picked for themselves, almost immediately. A jilted lover does not have to hear about their true love’s exploits in Barcelona or Munich or Blackburn. The jilted lover has it easy.
I remember wandering in a daze when I learned that Bill Shankly had resigned as manager of Liverpool. Why had he done that to me? I had just fallen head over heels in love with the Reds and had just comprehended the genius that was Shankly. Me and Shanks; he was going to see me through my school days, guide me through adolescence.
Fortunately, my favourite player, my absolute hero, was Steve Heighway, a winger with a strong sense of loyalty. He said he would never play for another English club and he was true to his word.
When he was deemed too slow for Liverpool he ended his playing days in the States. I never had to suffer watching him run out in a blue or a striped or a wrong shade of red shirt.
Part of the problem is the hysteria. Robbie Keane is going to Anfield?
Really? Where did that come from? One minute Spurs fans are reading about how much he loves Tottenham and being captain and the new regime at the Lane and the next he is yet another football commodity.
Some supporters cope better than others. I know of no Manchester United fan struggling with the Cristiano Ronaldo saga. They either adopt a ‘we should not stand in his way’ routine or maintain they never really liked him that much anyway. Arsenal fans are shrugging a good deal right now too.
The point is that all fans, in the end, survive the trauma because they remember who it is that they really are in love with. They love not the manager, nor the players, nor the ground, nor the strip but the club. In some respects football fans are chasing ghosts.
They are devoted to history, to past glory, to former players, to memories of the day they were a mascot or stumbled on the steps at Wembley or fainted on the Kop and had to be carried out through the men’s urinals (that was me).
We never learn though. You might think we would keep the lyrics to the songs nice and vague rather than pay homage to a chap who might disappear in a couple of months. But perhaps somewhere deep down we know we are not really singing about Fernando, we are singing about how lucky he is to be part of us and our endless pain.
