On football

With the new Premier League season kicking off this weekend, I look back on my journey as a football fan and what it has taught me.

It was autumn 1991, having just been kicked squarely between the legs by a girl in the year above me, that I first realised just how emotional – and painful – being a football fan can be. We were waiting for the school bus and I’d just said something unacceptable about Lee Sharpe and then emerging pretty-boy, Ryan Giggs. She was, of course, a Manchester United fan and this blow to the unmentionables was the opening salvo in my now thirty-plus year disagreements with their fan base. I’ll get it out there early, I’m a Leeds United fan. So, in the 1991/92 season this schoolboy, seeing his team riding high in what was to be the last season of the old First Division, was feeling particularly smug. Neither Giggs nor Man United would come to much over the glorious football filled years that stretched out before me. The era of Leeds United dominating the new Premier League was on the horizon and we had the French wizard, Eric Cantona, foolishly let go from a trial by Sheffield Wednesday. Giggs, Sharpe and Man United could jump in a lake and I made that painfully clear. Those with a passing knowledge of football history will realise that I was approaching the harshest of falls. Just over 12 months later, the same girl was dancing in front of me chanting ‘ooh ah, Cantona, oh yeah, Brian McClair’ as Leeds went from being First Division Champions to struggling to stay in the new Premier League, all while the Frenchman I’d fleetingly adored wreaked havoc on behalf of my sworn enemy. Oh, and we’re still waiting for the era of Leeds dominating the Premier League.

One of several, relatively subtle, Leeds shrines that adorn my study

Why Leeds United? A question I ask myself every day. It is the most punishing of existences. You don’t choose a football club to support. They choose you. For some, it’s a familial loyalty but growing up without a father, I eschewed the obvious choices of some in my family – Ipswich and Norwich. My friends were mostly fans of one of the holy trinity of Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United. But none had tugged at my heart. I forget the exact match that I fell in love with Leeds, I think it was in 1990 against Wimbledon. But I was definitely watching it, or the highlights, at my grandparents’ house and something about the noise from the crowd, angrily defiant, and the ferocious levels of passion on the pitch spoke to me. I was besotted and when told by my disappointed Ipswich supporting uncle, who lived with them, that my grandfather on my dad’s side hailed from Yorkshire, I realised it was written in the stars. Leeds were meant for me and I was meant for Leeds. Looking back, my family always had a predilection for sporting heroes whose commitment bordered on the violent. Other enduring memories include my very diminutive Great Aunt bellowing ‘kill him’ and ‘give them hell’ at an England rugby player launching himself at a Welsh opponent and my mother looking, rather too affectionately, at John McEnroe smashing tennis racquets like he was warding off evil spirits at a Greek wedding. Leeds and I were a match made in heaven.

In fact, being a football fan is the closest thing to organised religion that I practice. For true football fans it is a core part of who you are – cut me and I bleed the white of Leeds United. From August to May, it dictates my mood. Finding ourselves now in the Championship and one of the main TV draws, all too often we play on a Friday night or early on a Saturday. Thank you, Sky TV, for ruining so many weekends last season and – I am sure – this coming one. There is something inherently sneering about being a football fan, a feeling that nobody quite understands the passion of the game like you do and Leeds fans are amongst the most devout. We look at those who have a ‘second club’ with the disdain they deserve. If you’re a real fan, you can’t split your affections like you’re Lord Voldemort squirreling away parts of your soul. Your soul, in its entirety, belongs to one club and one club alone. Politics had to come into this at some point and when, during the recent General Election, I saw an opponent who claimed to be a Norwich City fan wishing Ipswich Town well, I knew they either weren’t really a Norwich fan or were lying. I love Suffolk, I love Ipswich as a place, I see all the economic benefits of Ipswich being in the Premier League and the logical side of my brain wants them to stay there. But deep in my soul I don’t, I want them to lose and lose terribly – I wish nothing upon them but Sheffield United levels of incompetence in defence just to spare me my smug friends gloating even more and parading their freshly pressed Kalvin Phillips shirts in front of me. If you’re a football fan, this is how you feel about your rivals – particularly those signing up your former stars. Admitting it might not be politically astute but all real fans know it’s the truth.

So many of my fondest memories revolve around the game, whether it was watching Euro 96 with my friend, Scott, or dropping in and out of the stockroom at Ottakar’s bookshop, a chain I worked for at the time, to keep up to date with Leeds putting four goals past Liverpool in the early 2000s. This latter match was made all the sweeter due to the fact my colleague, Pete, who I knew from school and who was unpacking boxes listening to the game, was an avid Liverpool fan. Much like the kung-fu adept girl at the bus stop, Pete had – and continues to have – the last laugh. Then there was the advent of Marcelo Bielsa and Leeds’ short-lived return to the Premier League, a feeling so pure it still brings tears to my eyes. Other football related events stick in my head because they opened my eyes to the game’s part in our collective behaviour. In October 1997 – while at university in London – I got wrapped up in the celebrations following England’s 0-0 draw with Italy that saw us qualify for the World Cup. Before I knew it, I was stood by a statue in Trafalgar Square with hundreds of others dancing and chanting. A year earlier, I’d read a book – which still sits on my shelf today – on ‘the power of the crowd’. This was an early lesson for me not just in the power crowds, literal and figurative, wield but also the power they hold over individuals caught up in them. Crowds can take on a life of their own and move with collective consciousness, in times of celebration – like 1997 – this can be unruly, unseemly even, but not destructive. At others, we see internal darkness and frustrations spill over into something else entirely.

El Loco Bielsa sits proudly, atop his bucket, on my desk at home

Being a football fan is difficult but being a Leeds fan is somewhere over the horizon beyond difficult. This becomes part of who you are. Sometimes, I wonder if I let it define me. We are a sleeping giant of the game in the sense that the history of the club, the size of the fanbase, the unrivalled passion, and the city being one of the largest ‘one club’ settlements in the country, all suggest we should be feasting at the top table of the English game. But we’re not. We are the worst kind of sleeping giant, one that’s actually awake and spends most of its time shooting itself in the foot or enduring the worst of luck. We are, forever, on the cusp of great things. In 1991/92 we won the league, only to nearly get relegated the next season. Under David O’Leary, we built one of the best squads in Premier League history, only for the then Chairman, Peter Ridsdale, he of expensive goldfish fame, to stretch the club financially and into ruin. Relegations followed.

Then came Bielsa, a god-like figure to Leeds fans – I’ve a statue of him on my desk which people always look at quizzically. Bielsa was Leeds; passion, unrelenting belief and a refusal to compromise. He gave himself fully to the fanbase and the fanbase reciprocated. Promotion under him was glorious and he so very nearly built a team that, with investment, could have kept us in the Premier League. When he was sacked, in hindsight unfairly, the fire that he started went out and another relegation to the second tier was inevitable. Terribly drafted contracts have seen us lose our best players at the most inopportune moments and now, a week into the Championship season, having sold our three best players, things – once again – look gloomy. But the fanbase persists, like Bielsa, unrelenting and unforgiving. Such is the weight of expectation that we heap on the players and manager, the pressure is all too often too much. We snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, there is sometimes an inevitability about it that we almost relish. That, in our collective subconscious, a glorious and valiant defeat brings comradery like nothing else. All Leeds aren’t we.

When giving a speech to the local Conservative Party following the general election defeat, I invoked some of my inner Leeds fan. I quoted a terrible film, that you should never watch, the sort of thing Channel 4 will show on a rainy Saturday afternoon, called Cockleshell Heroes and the line, ‘On this glorious occasion of the splendid defeat’. I quoted it because when you’re doing something you believe in, with a group of likeminded people, sometimes in defiance of the odds, you build irrepressible bonds. Being a Leeds United fan has taught me how to deal with loss and disappointment but also how important honesty and being true to yourself is. It’s also taught me, that when I give myself to something or to a task, it’s only worth doing if you fully commit and give it your all. Better to go down swinging than regret it later. Everyone will take something from the club they support and the journey it has given them. I’m just aiming to bounce back quicker than my beloved football club and rest assured, in the words of my Great Aunt, I’ll continue to give my political opponents hell until then.

PS. Ipswich, look after Kalvin, he’s something special…