Terriers are ideal underdogs for the floating fan
Huddersfield’s charm and back story are making Marcus Armytage transfer his allegiance yet again this season
I went off Leicester when they sacked their manager – it was a short affair
Last week I was picking blackberries, to go with the windfall cooking apples brought down by Aileen, not an au pair but the first “named storm” of our autumn. This week I’m picking football teams.
It gave me the chance to contemplate the summer sports that the blackberries, themselves nearly over, confirm are done and dusted for another year; indifferent Derby, reasonable Royal Ascot, wet Goodwood.
On the cricket front, there were curate’s-egg Test series against both South Africa and the West Indies and the World Athletics Championships never recovered from Usain Bolt being beaten by a drug cheat.
Something, though, has been spectacularly good about the summer of ’17 – there was no major international football tournament and, although it happens every other year, for some reason footballfallow summers feel as if they only come round about as often as Halley’s Comet. Like many others who are not engrossed with the daily shenanigans of the beautiful game, I do make an effort to get in front of a television when England are playing in the World or Euro finals, so it has been an angstfree summer.
My interest in the Premier League is cursory. I follow it from a safe distance. Like those bits of the motorway where you are meant to stay two arrows behind the vehicle in front – I give the Premier League three. I do not support a team financially or emotionally, I do not attend games or buy shirts, though I did have a Man U mug once for some reason – someone must have left it.
Instead, though I am not sure it is strictly allowed under the rules of football supporting, I regard myself as a floating voter and each season I like to pick a team to look out for, a team for whom my ears prick a little when Charlotte Green reads out their score on the car radio.
After Ms Green’s dulcet tones, I switch over before we get to the “complaints against the ref ” section of the programme from a litany of beaten managers.
My team have to be underdogs. It’s been Reading a few times in the past, mainly because they are local, though their yo-yo approach to membership of the top tier got a bit wearing in the end – for them as well as me. Last year, it was Leicester because for most of it they were propping up the table. It was a short-term affair, however, because I went off them when they sacked their manager.
This time, the club I will never go and see but will follow on a hands-free basis are Huddersfield Town. They look well-run, appear to have old-fashioned values, win or lose they exude the sheer joy of
being in the Premier League and there is a feel-good factor to their phoenix-like rise back to the top level that they once dominated.
Other more personal reasons include the fact that The Recalcitrant
Cow is one of the greatest poems ever written (essentially a man’s cow wouldn’t yield any milk because it didn’t like its “udders feeled”) and the club are known as “the Terriers” – of which I have two.
And the clincher; until three generations ago, Huddersfield was the long-time home to a succession of Armytages who, over time, took less and less heed of the family motto semper
paratum – always prepared – particularly in matters financial.
With Crystal Palace gifting the rest a 10-length start, Huddersfield – I mean “we” – have only to beat two others to stay up and with eight points on the board already, we are a quarter of the way there. Come on David Wagner and you, er, Terriers.