How to watch football

Watching football is a deceptively accessible pleasure, and whilst it is perfectly permissable (and some consider essential) to hurl abuse at the fourth official, an opposing centre-forward or your own team’s mascot, should you make the mistake of confusing any of these, your standing in the eyes of your peers will be substantially diminished (you shouldn’t be standing at a Premiership ground, anyway).
Before they started wearing pretty pastel colours for the television cameras, Referees and their Assistants (or ‘linesmen’, as they used to be called) dressed from toe to Acme Thunderer in darkest black. That is how my friend McWhirter recalled them from his very few schoolboy days on the terraces. This accounts for his faux pas as a guest for the first (and only) time in his new employer’s box at one of the country’s more prestigious grounds. McWhirter tried to ingratiate himself with his new boss by initiating the hurling of abuse at the darkly clad figure patrolling by the dug-out prior to the game. If only he had taken the precaution of checking the team’s new signings, he would not have made the mistake that cost him a substantial contribution to church funds and eventually his job. What McWhirter had failed to appreciate was that the club’s latest latin-american signing was deeply religious and had introduced an unusual rider to his contract. This explains why the new signing took particularly unkindly to McWhirter screaming “Who’s the bastard in the black?” as she was the nun whose contract obliged her to bless the subs bench. In the ensuing fracas, the bench was trashed, the new signing demonstrated the less religious side of his make-up and the nun showed a surprising turn of speed - and an equally surprising pair of testicles, but that's another story.

This blog will not only help you avoid such elementary mistakes, but will enable you to appreciate the finer points of watching the noble game.

Warm up exercise

For the first eighty years of its existence (the ‘modern’ game started around 1870), the tradition of ‘going to the match’ was passed with care from father to son. Women were involved from time to time, mainly in the procreation aspect of the tradition, but overwhelmingly, football crowds comprised men. Gloriously freed to shout, sing and swear out loud, men of all ages had their tweed jackets and broken-peaked caps jostled, soaked, frozen and, on rare occasions even lightly dampened with sweat in the cause of supporting their team.

The action was live, without the slightest thought of a replay, and no-one could have foreseen that some day in the distant future, seriously single-minded scientists would develop sophisticated euipment not in the uplifting cause of curing cancer or even the common cold, but merely to determine whether an inflated sphere of leather had crossed a whitewashed line or not.
In those days a father could explain the offside rule to his son in such simple language that the son wondered how it was that the referee failed to understand it, or at least got it so wrong so often. Without the plague of the instant replay, the knowledge imparted by father on the terraces was sacrosanct. It’s debatable whether society’s gain of the absolute knowledge about whether it was a penalty or not is a reasonable trade for the loss of parental respect in formative years. It all depends which way the penalty is being awarded, I suppose.

The point is, for the past sixty years, football has been the most accessible sport for all of us. Whether our fathers took us to matches or not, or even whether we know our fathers is now irrelevant - we can access football every minute of the day, if we so choose. And therein lies the irony. There are now more people watching the game than could ever have been imagined by my father, (a World Cup Final attracts at least 260 million viewers, or six times as many people who packed out the terraces over a 60 year period of watching football Stockport County) and yet, perversely, there are probably less people watching the game now who know what they are looking out for. They don’t have anyone to explain it to them, you see.
They do now.
This blog will be your father on the terraces, your brother on the settee and McWhirter’s wife on that night the car broke down on the A41 - in other words, what passes between us will remain a secret known only to you and I.

 

It has to remain a secret, you see, as, in this football obsessed world, if you are old enough to read this, then you are already too old to ask naive questions about whether it’s possible to score if you kick the ball into your own net after a direct free kick, or whether the six yard box is measured from the outside of the goal post or the inside. After a certain age, there’s an assumption that you know these things. You’ve gone too far to risk your credibility by asking someone the obvious.

There are only three ways to watch football : live at a match, ‘live’ on TV or internet, or post-match, edited highlights. You don’t need any knowledge to appreciate that there is a certain level of skill involved, but to maximise your pleasure, the more you know, the more you will enjoy. Read on and enjoy......