There's an old short story by Alan Sillitoe called, I think, Saturday Afternoon. It's about a factory worker who takes all his frustrations to the match on a Saturday afternoon and, if his team loses, goes home and beats his wife. Sillitoe tried to link the alienation of the factory with the promise of escape offered by football for the fan, to the appalling brutality that gets visited on the wife to vent the frustration.
Obviously a lot has changed since Sillitoe wrote the story in the early sixties. You'd be hard-pressed to find a factory in Nottingham, but call-centres are just as alienating. Domestic vioence is still depressingly common, though. And football, obviously, is infrequently on a Saturday afternoon.
Bruce Springsteen expressed a similar narrative in the track on 'Darkness on the Edge of Town' caled 'Factory Life' - 'you just better believe somebody's gonna get it tonight, the work, the work, the working life'.
I've always maintained I'm a West Ham supporter first, then a football supporter (and only ever an England supporter if there's a West Ham player in the team). West Ham is my passion, my release, my starter (and finisher!) in conversation with anybody with a passing interest in the game and a barometer of how positive I'm feeling about the world. Things going well generally? Any poor West Ham performance is a temporary blip - there'll be an upturn and a victory (or at least a glorious defeat) along soon. You have to be realistic about your expectations for a small Premier League club. Things generally not so good? Every defeat is a harbinger of doom - next season we'll be away at Doncaster and losing to Rotherham at home (or, worse, Millwall - sometimes nightmares come true).
So my brooding on the current failures may have more than a little to do with my work and the demands to implement cuts in really good public services and no realistic expectation of that being short term. And while I am sufficiently senior to (I think) be safe from losing my job, and anyway protected by a fairly sizeable pension, that's not true of others I have to make decisions about. And all of my children are not far into their careers and how will they be affected by this?
The owners of West Ham have always been to fans an evil we're not even sure is necessary. The Cearns family had a corner shop mentality that chafed but now seems a model of probity. Terrence Brown was rightly vilified for his Bond and parasitic salary. The Icelanders talked big and delivered bigger if what was required was debt. And now we have the Pornographers who make much of their lifelong love of the 'Appy 'Ammers - why David Gold was even on the books as a young player before finding his fortune in the delights of Dildo manufacture. More importantly, they did make money and have experience of running a football club without it going ruinously into debt (although Birmingham City have never really set anybody's pulses racing as much as the Dildos).
The business model of the Olympic Stadium makes sense (pile 'em high relatively cheap, sell the major property asset and pay the ground rent from regular takings. Even The Sheikhs of Man City rent their ground) even if nobody thinks it will make watching games an enhanced experience.
So, the pain of collapsing to Newcastle subsiding and the glimmer of a worm of belief that we could possibly beat Stoke City tomorrow, perversely because no-one (not even me until this point) believes we will after Saturday and, yes, there it is, the dawning of hope.
And, as we all know, it's not the depair, it's the hope that kills you ....
I have to say, at the moment the feelings of despair are taking their toll.
ReplyDeleteWho are the Dildos? Who do they play for?
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