Quentin Willson goes to his first ever football match expecting to end up in A&E — and leaves a misty-eyed evangelist for a sport he now feels is grotesquely misrepresented
There’s no easy way to confess this. You are the first people I’ve told. Until very recently I’d never, ever, been to a football match. For an alpha male this is a fairly damning admission I know, but I just never fancied all that shouting, that atavistic male tribalism. For me, football’s worst advertisement, like Christianity’s, was always its devotees. Fans like a horde of Mongol storm-troopers on a three-day pass, TV commentators spouting flannel in lengthy widths, barely articulate managers, players in tabloid trouble with totty and constantly crashing impossibly expensive cars. Football and football people sounded as much fun as a sinus wash.
Mind you, that’s not to say I never felt the odd ache of envy. Years of Saturday afternoons spent watching normally sane friends punch the air or howl in disappointment made me wonder why I couldn’t too. I admired their passion and need to belong. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told that it’s better to have watched and lost than never to have watched at all, and that the mass chanting of obscenities might in some way even be therapeutic for me. But I wasn’t having any of it. And here’s another confession. I’m the former Top Gear presenter who once spent half an hour chatting fast cars to Michael Owen thinking he was a cricketer. Embarrassing, but true.
So when a close friend invited me to watch Ipswich Town play Plymouth Argyle, the fear I’d been hiding from for over four decades came to find me. In the intervening weeks my anxiety turned to full-on panic.
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