Review: Proper Football

Bristol Rovers vs Alfreton Town, Memorial Stadium, Saturday 25^th April

I’m stood on a garage forecourt on Gloucester Road, drinking a can of Strongbow: Living the dream.

There is a large crowd of people, mostly men, spilling out from the pub onto the road and the petrol garage next door, drinking tinnies.  Passers-by, including drivers, are impressively calm at the large crowd and carnival atmosphere - especially the smiling bus and lorry drivers, (not a demographic widely renowned for their friendly demeanour), who edge past, negotiating their way around football fans who are in their way and not inclined to move.  Even passengers on the buses maintain the passive body language of people who are un-troubled with this minor inconvenience.  It’s all pretty jovial.  I’ve seen this kind of atmosphere before, at street protests, where it is often followed by a baton charge.

But this is a legally-mandated show of people power.  When a police van cruises past, it gets jeered, and many laugh openly at the police officer who is glaring menacingly out of the window, as if trying to not join in with the atmosphere, or deciding who to arrest later.  Honestly, if looks could kill…

The 5.15 kick-off has given everyone plenty of time to get a good base-level of alcohol in the blood stream, which will no doubt put everyone in good stead for later on….proper football innit.

“Where the fuck is Alfreton?”

This is a rhetorical question, posed by many, answered by none.

Not knowing where the other team is from: proper football.

Arriving at the stadium, regulars of Rovers games are wondering where all these new people have come from.  It's busy.  Very busy.  In fact, the crowd have set a record for attendance at a Conference football match.  The regulars are a bit like fans of bands that eventually get really big, but a lot less resentful about it.  It’s more fun when there’s a big crowd.  As a famous manager once said: “Football without fans is nothing”. 

The match is in fact a sell-out, with a crowd of over 11,000 people here.  That’s over 11,000 paying customers for a non-league football match on a Saturday afternoon in a city with plenty of options for Saturday afternoon entertainment.  Pretty impressive.  Unless you hate football, in which case, maybe it’s just evidence of the poor taste of large swathes of the population.  There’s a group of burly lads in front of us with beards and haircuts and printed t-shirts, drinking Jack Daniel’s. 

Even trendy kids go to the football these days.

Anyway, it’s a carnival atmosphere for the end of the season, and this remains until we hear that Barnet have scored.  This is bad news, because if Barnet win, they will win the title and Rovers’ result is academic.  Moot.  Irrelevant, even.  But, you know, we’re still having a laugh, even though the team can’t win anything.  Like Scotland fans.  (Proper football.)

The bearded lads in front deliver the most hipster insult I’ve ever heard (and surely the most hipster insult ever heard at a football match): “Fuck off back to Next, you prick!”

Ouch.

I’m not sure what the Alfreton player did to deserve this abuse and derision, but it may have been to do with not enough/too much/the wrong kind of product in his hair. 

I just don’t know.

I’m not young and trendy.

Alfreton are, without question, the worst team I’ve ever paid to see – and I once paid to see Partick Thistle vs Queen Of The South.  It’s an uneven league, the Conference, with a very obvious difference in ability between the top teams and the bottom teams. 

So, Rovers, the superior team in this contest, need to win today and also need Barnet to lose – but the damage was done last week, when they failed to win to take advantage of Barnet’s draw.  Rovers also drew that match, after conceding a late equaliser, caused entirely (according to Rovers fans who were there) by nerves in the Rovers defence.

Rovers have a habit of making things difficult for themselves and nerve-jangling for their fans.  Like almost all football teams.  The people that run the club are viewed with suspicion and derision by some fans, and they, in turn, treat the fans with a disdain bordering on contempt. 

Just like almost all football clubs.

Football fans are in the invidious position of being treated as customers by a business they do not see as a business (or, at least, not strictly a business like any other).  They want the business to succeed, but not at any cost – and not at the cost of pouring their own money in with no say in how it is spent, and no chance to influence those business decisions, and little/no success on the pitch.  (Most fans would probably want to spend as much money on the team as possible, whereas the hard-nosed business types who run clubs prefer to keep the wage and transfer bills down, which often makes the team itself less competitive – not always, football is less predictable than that.  It’s like the disconnect between the public wanting to spend public money on public services, and their political representatives preferring to spend it on nuclear submarines and bars where you can still smoke.)

In the event, Rovers win the match 7-0, but Barnet also win.  The upshot is, Barnet are promoted and Rovers go into the Play-offs, the winners of which will also get promotion back to the Promised Land of League Football, and glamour ties against Accrington and Hartlepool.

In the bar after the game, those jostling to get served put up a far sterner defence than the away team managed.  Everyone is happy with a big win, and also a bit disappointed at not winning the league.  Conflicting emotions, cynicism, gallows humour, rivalry, abuse, hilarious chants, pasties, pints, big crowds: proper football.