H& V 128 – January 2006
I suppose I’d better start off with a confession. I don’t like football. To be honest, I don’t like Aston Villa. Now before you start wondering what I’m doing writing in H&V and why don’t I piss off down the Sty, let me explain.
I don’t like Aston Villa plc, members of the Premier League. I love Aston Villa Football Club, the greatest and most historic name in football. Just in case you don’t understand, let me go further. I was brought up on tales of Billy Walker and Pongo Waring courtesy of my granddad. My dad still bores me senseless with the story of how he saw Johnny Dixon in Sut ton with his wife the week after the 1957 cup final and insisted on carrying their shopping how for them. or was it Peter McParland? The identity changes after he’s had a few, but never mind. He started taking me down the match in the the third division, so I thought every team had gates of forty thousand. He took me to Blackpool and Sheffield Wednesday when we got promotion in 1975, so I thought that every ground was full of Villa supporters wherever we played.
When I left school, happily enough in 1980, I travelled first the country and then Europe. I endured the bad days and yes, I was on that bowel-loosening hike down Seven Sisters Road in 1985, so graphically described in H&Vs past. I’ve seen good times, bad times and the ones in between. I’v dragged girlfriends, fiance and now children down the match. Until a couple of seasons ago I was as committed as the next Villa supporter. But no longer. So what’s stopped it? In truth, there’s been a combination of things. These are just a few:
Graham Taylor’s return: I loved the man first time round. I could see what he was trying to do when he came back – we couldn’t go on spending millions on players who weren’t up to the job in the hope that this time we really would crack it. The performances were crap, but what I really couldn’t handle was the abuse he was getting. His service to the club aside, Taylor is one of the most honest men in football. Read David Conn’s The Beautiful Game for evidence that, even when he was England manager, Graham spoke out against the setting up of the Premier League because, although it was supposed to strengthen the national side, anyone could see that it would cause irreparable damage to English football as a whole. Such integrity is rare these days, but Graham didn’t do what the mob wanted, so he had to be booed at the end of his last game at Villa Park. What a wonderful end to the career of a man who single-handedly prevented us from going the same way as Wolves.
Cup competitions: The FA Cup final, and the way we struggled to sell our tickets. I always thought that if we ever got there, the queues for tickets would stretch to Coventry, but instead they got within a day of going on general sale. Every time we get dumped out of a cup by a team from whatever division it’s called now, the cry comes that winning in the league next Saturday is more important. The general feeling that it’s better to finish fourth than actually win a trophy. Is it bollocks.
Jlloyd Samuel: It’s hard to single one out, but he’s the personification of everything that’s wrong with modern footballers. Good enough to be in the England squad, but content to churn out mediocre performances week after week, because he’s still getting paid. And that makes him rich enough to have a daft bet with his girlfriend on a football match to the tune of fifty grand. If I bet somebody a fiver on something like that my wife would make me sleep in the spare room.
Our lovely support: I used to sit in the Holte, until I got fed up of the twats around me, with their endless songs about the Blues, screaming and shouting, and their nasty little hounding of anybody who acts different to them. Two years ago one of them reckoned I must support the Blues because I didn’t stand up to hate them quick enough. He soon learned, but the rest of his gang didn’t.
Sky: Saturday, three o’clock. What’s so hard to understand? That’s when football was meant to be played, not on Monday night, or Sunday afternoon, or at midday. If we got our act together we could stop all of this nonsense, just by threatening to cancel Sky subscriptions until they sort the fixtures out. But we’re too selfish and stupid to realise whose game it is.
And the final straw came against Liverpool last season. Villa supporters cheering when Albion stayed up. I tried to ask one of them why, and he muttered something about it was good to have local teams in the Premiership because they are easy to get to. When I pointed out the concept of local rivalry, or in my case hate he said “We hate Blues. Albion hate Wolves.” I tried to explain Alex Cropley, Ronnie Allen in 1959, Ray Graydon, but it was no good. Blues are our rivals because it says so on Sky. That’s when I realised that I’m out of touch with modern football supporters.
Maybe it’s because attendances were so low in the eighties, but the new breed of ‘soccer fan ‘ didn’t have the knowledge handed down to them., they picked it up off the telly. The folklore I was introduced to at an early age – great players of the past, myths and legends, shared experiences – are totally alien concepts to them. They see nothing wrong with kick-off times being pissed about with by television, because it means they can see fourteen repeats of the same match on their computer screens. It’s supposed to be progress, but again I think it’s bollocks. Football’s about real life, not a TV game show.
So I decided to pack it in. it’s not been easy, and I’ve fallen off the wagon a couple of times. The Burnley game, because it was cheap, then Everton and Arsenal over Christmas because my mate was going away and lent me his season ticket. The matches were okay but the problems were still there, and in particular the nasty little wankers sitting behind, who spent all match singing about the Blues and couldn’t string a sentence together that didn’t include a swear word.
Now my Saturdays are non-league. Living in Quinton, there’s a lot of choice – Kidderminster (it’s true about their food, it’s better than I get at home), Halesowen or Midland Combination games where the crowd only just outnumber the teams and the kids can run around the goal to their hearts’ content. Two or three quid admission, a couple of pints and a burger, and sometimes I don’t even bother finding out how the Villa got on until I buy the Argus ( us non-league types love the Argus, even if it is now an extortionate 50p). Most matches I go to I talk to others just like me; disillusioned with the clubs they’d supported all their lives and rediscovering what football’s really about.
I live in hope that there’ll be enough of us to form a local version of FC United, not in protest at the takeover of one club by a businessman, but because of the takeover of the entire game by a host of big business interests. Once again I could support a proper football team for the right reasons.
Dave Atkins.
Heroes and Villains 