My mean-spirited side

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February 9, 2014 by Will

The other night, I had a (slightly boozy) late-night conversation with my dad about this year’s relegation candidates, and specifically the ones who had indulged in managerial changes. Sideways Looker senior has a pretty warm-hearted approach to football – he tends to support English clubs in international competitions, and actively dislikes the sort of fan hatred that leads to booing young men who have the temerity to leave their club for a different team.  But in this conversation, he came as close to mean-spiritedness as he ever does when he suggested that he would like to see clubs such as Cardiff go down, in order to emphasise the stupidity and vaingloriousness of buffoons such as Vincent Tan.  Warming to his theme, he suggested Swansea, Fulham, and West Brom as other worthy beneficiaries of the drop.

My own position, incidentally, is one of broad agreement.  This season has been a particularly bad one for the sacking of men who were clearly decent managers with not enough talent to work with (Malky Mackay, Steve Clarke) or ones with injury-hit teams struggling for form (Martin Jol, Michael Laudrup). Whether you agree or not with this snap assessment, it’s a reasonable argument to make that you can draw a line in the sand between the above examples, and a team like Crystal Palace, who made a change early on, with the man they really wanted available for hire.  But a bigger question popped into my mind – is it okay to want teams to go down?  Occasionally I chide myself, as a Chelsea fan, for disliking Gus Poyet, a man who provided sterling playing service at my club, but who went on to make rather a lot of snide comments about his old employers when part of Spurs’ back team.  It’s petty, and pathetic.  Surely wanting a club to actually get relegated is even more mean-spirited than that?  If I write any kind of blog criticising fan hatred, am I a hypocrite?

If you answered ‘yes’ to the last question, then I have nothing more to say to you.  You are a joyless pedant and as bad in your own way as the people who use phrases like ‘that ref was a f**king disgrace’ and ‘there should be an instant review system for offsides like in the tennis’.  Football may be only a game, but it is a game with a great, big, preposterous, enjoyable layer of drama straddling it and squeezing it like Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye.  Narratives are fun if applied in a light-hearted way, and we should all feel free to apply our own if it’s just for our own enjoyment.  Man United are losing to Fulham right now, after 77 minutes.  They really shouldn’t be; it’s not a fair scoreline and I feel genuinely sorry for David Moyes, a man who does not deserve these horrors.  But bloody hell, it’s fun to watch.  United have been a terrifying force for far too long and the game itself is dreadful – one terrible team holding out against a team woefully lacking in quality.  My own sense of narrative hurts no-one, and makes it fun.

But if United do turn it round, I have to avoid getting upset about it – I have to shrug my shoulders and move on.  That’s the difference.  It’s not complicated.