Quentin Willson goes to his first ever football match expecting to end up in A&E — and leaves a misty-eyed evangelist for a sport he now feels is grotesquely misrepresented
There’s no easy way to confess this. You are the first people I’ve told. Until very recently I’d never, ever, been to a football match. For an alpha male this is a fairly damning admission I know, but I just never fancied all that shouting, that atavistic male tribalism. For me, football’s worst advertisement, like Christianity’s, was always its devotees. Fans like a horde of Mongol storm-troopers on a three-day pass, TV commentators spouting flannel in lengthy widths, barely articulate managers, players in tabloid trouble with totty and constantly crashing impossibly expensive cars. Football and football people sounded as much fun as a sinus wash.
Mind you, that’s not to say I never felt the odd ache of envy. Years of Saturday afternoons spent watching normally sane friends punch the air or howl in disappointment made me wonder why I couldn’t too. I admired their passion and need to belong. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told that it’s better to have watched and lost than never to have watched at all, and that the mass chanting of obscenities might in some way even be therapeutic for me. But I wasn’t having any of it. And here’s another confession. I’m the former Top Gear presenter who once spent half an hour chatting fast cars to Michael Owen thinking he was a cricketer. Embarrassing, but true.
So when a close friend invited me to watch Ipswich Town play Plymouth Argyle, the fear I’d been hiding from for over four decades came to find me. In the intervening weeks my anxiety turned to full-on panic. I even spoke to Adrian Chiles (a man who remembers football scores like you and I remember holidays) for some first-timer advice. Telling me that Ipswich fans weren’t really known for violence helped a bit. But he gravely added that I shouldn’t attempt to wear any regalia and if cornered and asked to declare my sympathies it would be best to say that I admired both teams but was really there just to get pissed. He also thought it might be helpful if I wore some sort of disguise. I genuinely believed he was being serious.
On the appointed Saturday I approached the dreaming spires of Ipswich fully expecting the next 90 minutes to feel a lot like being trapped in the middle of a large herd of roused animals. That the ground resembled the headquarters of a reasonably prosperous bank or that the queuing supporters had no obviously concealed scaffolding poles offered little solace. I took a deep breath and headed for the turnstiles. Within seconds a voice behind me boomed, ‘Didn’t know you were into football.’ A small knot of men quickly gathered and before I had time to make a sprint for the car the largest (whose neck was thicker than a birthday cake) grabbed my hand and said ‘Welcome to Ipswich Town, mate.’ I nearly fainted.
Accompanied by a chorus of vroom, vroom noises and the odd steering-wheel mime I walked anxiously to my seat and began to apply myself to deconstructing this rich and strange national obsession that for so long had failed to fire me. Now, if you’re expecting any seminal insights or mystical moment of revelation, you’ll be disappointed. Nor will I attempt to pretend to make any bogus observations on what was happening on the pitch. But there was one thing that did strike me, and that was the man sitting in the row in front. He was clapping. Whenever the ball got near the goal he clapped, rather decorously as it happened. I looked round and saw that others were too. And it didn’t matter which team was battling towards the net, everybody applauded. Gestures of gentility you don’t normally find in the House of Commons, never mind a football ground. Strange.
Slowly I began to realise that I’d got this game all wrong. The obligatory chanting never included the c-word, cheery OAPs periodically trotted round selling charity raffle tickets, and by the end of the first half I’d witnessed no feral ferocity at all. Was this, I began to wonder, an authentic footballing experience? Had I come on the wrong day? And then it happened. A foul. Instantly the crowd reared up in disapproval and a forest of arms stabbed at the pitch with outrage. The frisson of anger was palpable. The referee waved some coloured cards, there was a stern behavioural lecture and then the offending player faced the stands, bowed his head for forgiveness and then apologetically slapped the back of the man he’d so recently felled. Involuntarily, I started to clap. Football was tickling my heart with delicate fingers.
The rest of the match passed in an agreeable blur. Even to my inexpert eyes Ipswich played well, relentlessly harrying the Plymouth defenders, but sadly not well enough. The final whistle blew with no goals scored. As the ground emptied I sat surprised at a new sensation of warm approval. I’ll now admit that my extreme paranoia had been rooted in the brutal hooliganism of the 1980s with its blizzards of broken bottles and crowds rippling with organised fury. That apocalyptic news footage had stayed with me for far too long. But whatever this billion-pound industry had done in the intervening years to address its bloodied past, those efforts never quite reached me. And I can’t be alone. I resolutely refuse to believe that there aren’t thousands of others like me who genuinely think that those stands can still be scary.
These days football (and I shall always be grateful to Ipswich Town for showing me this) is clearly much more sinned against than sinning. I know this now. Its PR still needs polishing, the managers still need elocution lessons, and its players should definitely all learn to drive a bit better. But listen to the unimpeachable testimony of the man who was expecting an afternoon at A&E: football matches are about as frightening as Formula 1. I’d love to admit that I now pore over the sports pages and can decode the arcane complexities of the offside rule, but that would be a whopper of some magnitude. But I do occasionally toy with yet one more footballing ambition, one last rite of passage.
And that’s an afternoon at the hallowed Chelsea ground. Will I be disappointed, should I just close the box and leave it here, will my new misty-eyed evangelism be ruined? Answers on a postcard, please.