Thursday, 27 January 2011

The Man Who Mistook His Football Team For A Life: Carling Cup Semi-Final Second Leg: Birmingham 3 - 1 West Ham (4-3 aggregate); 26 January

West Ham's season in micrososm was on display here.  Easily in control for the first half, followed by the usual collapse and defeat in the second half.  We're not bottom of the league for nothing.

More to be reflected on was what it said about me.  The Controller ended the evening almost as annoyed with me as I was with everyone connected with the management of West Ham.  She very forcefully expressed the view that watching my team made me a bad-tempered, drama queen.  She didn't quite get to saying it's only a game, but there was definitely that as a subtext.  She pointed out that our dogs wouldn't stay in the room while I'm watching West Ham (any other match they're perfectly ok with, if not ready to discuss the finer points of tactics).  As the clincher, she maintained that I'd created the same misery in my children and was now about to pass it on to my grandson.  It amounted to emotional abuse.

There's some truth in all of that, I think.  Watching West Ham has, over the years, given me enormous pleasure at too infrequent intervals.  It has provided some of the peaks of experience to look back on.  But those are only peaks because they stand in the middle of troughs, and lately there have been too many troughs and too few peaks for me to hold a balanced view.

But it's also an opportunity to channel other feelings (if the Scientologists will permit use of the verb).  When there is a high level of pressure and stress in real life, the game is a respite.  So my mother's dementia and the watershed moment of moving her into sheltered accommodation (with all the attendant almost unbelievable hassle of dealing with the bureaucracy of social services, benefits and pensions agency, the mechanics of the move) can have its emotional freight stowed onto a football match.  The pressures of a job requiring me to promote swingeing cuts that will directly affect people's employment and try to do it honestly and openly and maintain a public service, all at breakneck speed to impossible deadlines, can be parked on the touchline for ninety minutes (plus stoppage time).

But when yet again the team fails to deliver the minimum that a half-competent professional organisation should, then the times I feel like swearing at the phone as I get passed to yet another person who can't deal with a pension credit or care plan, the times when I can't say, no, stick £49 millions savings, it was the bankers who fucked up, not the public services and, hey, they're still getting shedloads of money, well, I can do a credit transfer of my feelings to West Ham.

But they deserve it in their own right as well.

And at least being beaten by Birmingham (why did Lee Bowyer never score goals like that when playing for us?) will mean I can't be patronised by Arsenal fans after being thrashed in a Wembley final. 

And if Avram is breaking the habit of getting teams to finals, perhaps he'll also break the habit of getting teams relegated.

Yeah, right.

No comments:

Post a Comment