What the fuss is about football

Let me be honest with myself here. I’m not a football fan. I cannot claim to be much of an enthusiast either. The interest rises along with the hype every four years when a World Cup comes along. I’ve never felt the excitement and fever pitch that grips people in club football. Perhaps influenced by cricket, I’ve always had an affinity for country v country. That could explain my relative lack of interest in the IPL, a tournament which in my opinion is a necessary evil for various reasons. That’s a topic for another day.

Back to football, I don’t play FIFA like many Indians do and claim to be football fans thanks to Playstation. I don’t hit sports bars specifically to watch Arsenal v Man Utd or spend hundreds on merchandise, or paint my face with a country’s flag, only to wash it off the next day and erase it from memory, like a one-night stand.

Blame it on cricket, but I’ve always found it hard to give equal attention to two or more sports at the same time. I landed in England at the closing stages of the cricket season and at the peak of the football season. With several months to kill, I decided to find out what the ruckus was all about. When in Rome, do as the Englishmen do.

Sheffield has two teams, neither of which are in the premiership and still some distance away from qualification to the EPL. One of them, Sheffield Wednesday, is currently in a debt crisis, with one potential bidder pulling out of the race. Fans are angry and demand change soon. It’s the last thing an underachieving team needed.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a neon sign near my university about Wednesday’s next game against Hartlepool United, a team or town I’d never heard of. Nevertheless, I decided to go for it and managed to find two classmates, both Wednesday fans, to tag along with. My last live football game was way back in 1993 (India v Cameroon) so this was my first in England.

I ended the 17-year vacuum at Hillsborough, the home base of Sheffield Wednesday. It’s strange that I picked a stadium with a morbid past – in April 1989, 96 Liverpool fans were killed a stampede in a FA Cup semi-final. It is still the worst ever football tragedy and among the worst in sport.

My mental image of live football in England was about screaming fans and hooliganism (no offence meant, but blame the media for that!) but as I approached Hillsborough, there was barely a ripple. Something’s got to be wrong, I thought. Perhaps it was the context of the match and the opposition. This was not the EPL, but the Johnstone Paints Trophy, a league tournament.

Only two sides of the stadium were packed with spectators. The other two were practically empty. You could count the number of loyal Hartlepool fans who bothered to show up. Despite the unexpectedly low turnout (10,500), the atmosphere was by no means dull. There were enough Wednesday fans to make a noise and chant the team song and Michael Sembello’s Maniac (from Flashdance). A Mexican Wave was out of the question though.

What surprised me most were the Barmy Army chants. I was under the impression it was solely reserved for the English cricket team. Anything motivational goes. Having braved the cold, you might as well shout something to keep warm.

The match was expectedly one-sided. Neil Maller scored a hat-trick to make it 4-1 for Wednesday. When Hartlepool scored, the silence was surreal, for me at least. It was quite a good goal, one of the best of the evening, but the lack of any applause took a few seconds for me to register that they had actually opened their account.

Perhaps it’s my cricket watching experience speaking here. Having watched most games in Chennai, which has one of the most sporting crowds in world sport, it’s natural to stand up and applaud the opposition for a good bit of cricket. Not quite the same in football I’m afraid. Thank goodness I barely moved, or else I’d have risked being glared at (possibly beaten) by Wednesday fans or being shipped by parcel to Hartlepool!

The experience was worth every bit of the 5 quid I paid. Ten times that amount will give you a ticket to an EPL game, which I hope to experience while I’m here.