WILL HAYWARD
Will Hayward is a tortoise-owning journalist, sports coach, history fan and all-round nerd. He is also the Western Mail’s Welsh affairs editor.
IAM currently in a toxic relationship that I need to get out of, but I don’t know how. It doesn’t work for me any more. It goes against my fundamental values as a human being. I am not even sure I enjoy any of the time I spend in it. I have remained stuck through the dual rationales of habit and nostalgia.
There was a time it was so, so good. It felt so pure. The moments spent in the other’s company were among the highlights of my week. If there was a week when we were not able to be together I would be constantly on my phone trying to keep track of what they were up to.
Through this relationship I have made friendships and memories I would be loath to end or sully through a break-up.
But I have to do it. This relationship – which began when I was just five years old – is with football.
When we started seeing each other on April 30, 1995, my beloved West Bromwich Albion beat Tranmere Rovers 5-1 in the sunshine at the Hawthorns (the highest ground above sea level, don’t you know). Like all relationships, the early days showed only promise and gave no hints of the trials to come.
That first match left a six-year-old me, who up until this point had only cared about Club chocolate bars and dinosaurs, under the impression that being a football fan was a long parade of constant wins, six-goal matches and sunny days.
The reality is not the same. The wins are as scarce and the goalless draws are plentiful. For every sunny day there is a sodden trudge back in the dark to a car you have parked on some estate two miles from the ground. And I heave my freezing body into the car and beg Dad to both turn the heating and radio on so I can listen to angry people with Black Country accents on a football phone-in lament the fact the manager is “tactically naive” (although Dave from Walsall never explains what his own managerial credentials are).
But, despite the misery that comes with a football fandom, this has never, ever been a problem. You need lows for highs. Great memories never come from unwavering endless success. In the same way that I never realised how lovely my local park was until I could only leave the house for 30 minutes in lockdown, the low points as a fan make you feel like the good times really matter. It is the very fleetingness of the joy that makes you treasure it.
Even in the worst of times there is pleasure to be had. I always go to the games with my dad, with the debriefs filling our phone calls for the coming weeks. I always get a bacon bap from my auntie. We always laugh at the miserable people behind us (known as “the moaners”). None of this could be hindered by a bad result. It is the base level of happiness that came from following my team.
Even beyond the personal experience there was a pride that came with my team. The first professional club to have three black players. Regis, Cunningham and Batson’s names are still sung to this day.
When Peter Odemwingie, who is black, joined us from Spartak Moscow, the Russian fans put up a banner saying, “Thanks West Brom” and a picture of a banana. The Albion fans responded with a banner of their own, crowdfunded, showing a picture of Peter celebrating his first goal with a banner saying “Thanks Spartak Moscow”. It was a club with soul and I loved that it was mine.
But in recent years I have felt my love of the beautiful game wane. It isn’t the money per se that disgusts me, but where it has come from and the imbalance it creates. When Newcastle play Man City it is hard to feel the love I did for all football as a kid.
You know that the historic club of Newcastle is essentially a PR machine for a Saudi regime that stones women for adultery, gays for being who they are and murders journalists for doing their job. It is repulsive. But fans cheer because they are more likely to buy a decent striker than the previous scummer who owned the place. A gay person can be killed in Abu Dhabi, home to Man City’s owners, but the club will still chuck rainbow laces on their players.
Football is not the football I fell in love with. The branding, the empty gestures, the fact that if your club isn’t bankrolled by oil the best you can ever dream of is limping to a 10th-place finish where your only reward is to pray that you can stay up next year or risk financial oblivion.
If you support a rich team you are rewarded by a club which will gladly break away from your domestic league to create a super league to protect themselves from their own relentless financial mismanagement.
As a fan, viewers on the other side of the world matter more than you do as games are moved to ridiculous times because it will get better views for a TV company. Never mind the Southampton fans who have to get to Newcastle by midday on a Sunday.
Even my own WBA has an absentee Chinese owner who appears to have no interest in nurturing the institution he purchased.
But I don’t blame fans for cheering for their teams, however repellent the ownership. Football fandom is a relationship and many of us have stayed in a toxic relationship far too long because of love. Even when the other side of that relationship is taking more and more of your money out of your pocket because they decide you need a new outfit every season.
When huge parts of your childhood and family are associated with a relationship it is hard to break free, even though it is not the sport you fell in love with.
I have tried seeing other people, I really have. But my initial dates with the England cricket team have left me pining for those cold nil-nil draws with a bacon sandwich.