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Roger Rabbits with |
Find me a cult buster? I need one to brainwipe the brainwashed, before she spends $NZ200 on a Virgil van Dijk match jersey and another $NZ2000 on a season ticket to Liverpool’s Kop.
If you can get one – there’s a waiting list for $NZ2000 Liverpool season tickets. A waiting list to watch football – really?
Bet the Wellington Phoenix wished they had that problem.
And the pronoun ‘she’ because their identity is being withheld as the writer risks being family slammed. Maybe I’m too late. Maybe she’s already indoctrinated, already lost to football.
Which is interesting because before she left for the Mother Ship, HMS England, she would turn up her snooty wee netball nose at mention of ‘soccer’ or football. “Soccer – pffft!” Now she’s like a religious convertee.
It’s sporting Stockholm Syndrome – that psychological phenomenon where hostages or victims develop positive feeling and bonds towards their captors. She knows ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ word perfect. “At the end of the storm, is a golden sky….” And win or lose, she will sing, hum, whistle perhaps the world’s best known sporting anthem. “...and the sweet silver song of a lark.”
Roar on Liverpool, roar on Reds.
Puke or poop
This Kiwi ‘she’ can hold their own in a discussion on the subtleties of Slot versus Klopp football management styles, at the same time as they’re changing a diaper for a bub wearing a $NZ100 Liverpool ‘little kids home kit’. There’s a spare $NZ100 ‘Liverpool little kids home kit’ in the drawer should bub puke, or poop, on the one he’s wearing.
She can happily hole up in a pub for four hours on Sunday afternoon watching the Reds screw Spurs for the EPL championship on telly, then go home for a replay of the replay. She is in football’s clasp. I have lost her to football.
Football, I now figure, is like some insidious cancerous growth – just a couple of games, and a couple of pints, and it metastasises, eats into your soul.
Perhaps we can do a bulk deal with the cult busters because I too am now in football’s thrall. The body clock jolts me awake at 3.07 on a Monday morning and I spill out of bed to watch the Red’s EPL championship clincher against Spurs. In the dead of night I’m screaming at the telly for a third goal before half-time. Then one of those glorious unscripted moments when Mohamed Salah, on the back of his goal, grabs a fan’s phone and they pose mid-game, mid-pitch, for a celebratory selfie. Ever seen a grown man cry? And this from someone who for years mocked football for its penalty box dives, its overpaid and excitable players and their injury theatrics, men who wear football socks like women wear stockings, and yawn-long periods of goalless play.
My worst ever
I was born into rugby and baptised with Speights. Then, like the Catholics, rugby league ‘took the boy and returned the man’. The blood of Christ at this conversion was Lion Red. I swapped Lomu, McCaw and Fitzpatrick for Stacey Jones, Shaun Johnson, Nicoll-Klokstad and Watene-Zelezniak.
I can sense fusty old rugby buffs down the Avenues harrumphing their disapproval. Rugby league…pffft!
Now I embrace football. The EPL, the A-League, the Phoenix women at Porirua Park. Which is odd because the EPL and football provided my worst-ever sporting experience. Highbury, one Boxing Day morning, and the crowd in the standing-only pen was so concentrated you couldn’t lift your arms. It would surge forward and sway, then surge back. You couldn’t fight it. Scary. If you went down, you wouldn’t get up. What an obituary – “Trampled to death at a football match…”. And the stench of sweaty Pommy bodies disgorging the toxins from Christmas day excesses. What a pong.
Just a few days later and I was in a genteel main stand seat at St James Park watching the Geordies. It wasn’t “beautiful” as Pele would suggest but it was funny. Every time the fat-ish linesman drifted our way, the crowd chanted “who stole the pork pies?” It prompted the match official to rub his ample gut and laugh. They never let up on him, poor man. The Magpies got done by three that day, so the fat linesman gave us a distraction.
Singing their song
Now nearly three decades later I’m sitting watching English football at 4.30am and eating cold leftover sausages. I’ve never been to Liverpool, nor Anfield, nor seen the Reds play live. I could name only two or three players, but I’m a vicariously devoted fan from 12,000km away. The phone pings right on full-time. Incoming from ‘she’. “League winners 2025 – We’re buzzing!! Silly what something like this can mean.”
Silly? Three point five billion people watch football globally – 3,500,000,000 – that’s a lot of zeroes kicking footballs around. I make it 3,500,000,001.
“Walk on, with hope in our heart…” The Reds have stolen my soul and I’m singing their song too.