WE FANS LOVE A GOOD MOAN
According to a recent imaginary survey, at least 90 per cent of supporting a football club involves moaning.
As visitors to Woking’s Kingfield Stadium will attest, this trait is knowingly commemorated by the famous Moaners’ Corner Café. Extending the brand further, particularly bitter fans can even enjoy a pint of Moaners’ Bitter to wash down their gripes.
You might think that NonLeague fans have a lot to moan about, but perversely the moaning seems to intensify the higher up the pyramid you go. My attention was drawn this week to a video clip of a young Arsenal fan bleating that in his short life he had only seen a few FA Cups and that what he really wanted was the Champions League and the Premier League. To quote Phoenix Night’s wheelchair-bound Brian Potter: “I wanna moonwalk son, but life’s a s***house.” To be fair, the kid was only echoing his elders, and everyone wants the best for their club. But raging into the void while sat in the top four, in the knockout stages of the Champions League, and playing in a £390 million pound stadium could be interpreted as the spoilt ramblings of an entitled little pipsqueak.
As a Chester fan of some vintage, I think I’d probably settle for a few FA Cups in my lifetime. In fact I’d settle for any kind of visit to Wembley. We’ve never played there, something that I’m reminded of every time I look out of my bog window, the distant arch mocking my plight. Actually, never mind the FA Cup, writing this on the back of two 1-0 defeats, at the moment I’d take a shot on target.
Nonsense
The Arsenal kid is by no means the only deluded fan to bemoan their gilded fortune, and the doom scroll recently revealed a Manchester United supporter claiming that they must be the most traumatic club in the world to support. It was mainly an attention-seeking ploy to direct traffic towards her adult channel, but an outlandish claim nevertheless. Elsewhere, West Ham fans are always good entertainment, demanding the manager’s head whenever they lose a game, despite being in the top six with a European trophy and the freedom of the Olympic Stadium. Clearly, social media exacerbates such nonsense, but it was almost certainly ever thus. There were probably people who thought that Maradona should win more in the air and that Brazil ‘70 should track back.
Trench
Not to be moanier-than-thou, but you have to wonder what would happen if these witless poltroons supported a genuine problem club, as many of us do. Their heads would probably fall off. You can almost imagine a football-themed version of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch: “Points deduction? I used to dream of a points deduction! We once had our club wound up and the results expunged from the league. Expunged! Expunged, I tell thee…”
I was reminded of this sorry state of affairs on New Year’s Day with my second ever visit to Warrington Town. My previous visit coincided with the reformed Chester FC’s first ever competitive game back in 2010, the opening step on a journey into a brave new world. That day, I watched some of the game from a balcony in the company of the Lord Mayor with a buffet laid on.
As one of the ‘lucky’ 400 to secure a ticket in the away end – relayed to me via a network of fans – this time I stood ankle deep in mud and tried not to fall into a cordoned-off trench that may well have appeared on Time Team. A truly atrocious game in dismal conditions, the highlight was watching the World Darts Championship on my phone as Warrington’s teen sensation Luke Littler beasted his quarter-final. An horrendous start to the year, looking for positives I secured a superb free parking spot, saw some faces, and suffered no ill-effects from the prematch burger. Otherwise, there was not much to recommend. But I didn’t post a snide little video bemoaning my fate and demanding the moon on a stick. I got in the car, expelled some expletives, cursed the day I was born and sped back for the darts.
Game, shot and the match...