By Ally McKenzie
It has recently struck me that my relationship with football is no longer infatuation but a full blown obsession that there is no escape from.
It consumes every part of my functioning brain from first thing in the morning to last thing at night to the extent where the most ordinary of things becomes football related.
I don’t look at, say, 2012 as a year but the latter stages of 2011-12 season and the first half of the 2012-13 season.
Like all football fans, my yearly calender runs from August to May.
In June and July of odd years, I wander through the wilderness trying to attach myself to sports that might substitute my need for adrenaline and passion but, ultimately, the Olympics fails to fill the football-sized hole in my life.
I find I associate important dates and life events with football matches of great significance.
When a colleague recently asked when I had graduated from the college I now teach at, I assured him the year was 2010.
My reasoning for this was, ‘It was the year Chelsea won the title on the final day of the season, 8-0 against Wigan!’
To which this non-football fan looked at me with utter confusion before changing the topic of conversation to the weather or something equally as dull and drab to me as the beautiful game is to him.
I had to add ‘And I was there!’. Though I knew this wouldn’t impress him in any way, I felt it was my duty as a football fan to tell someone that I had been there to share my team’s achievements.
I think the reason for my, and many other fans’, obsession with football is down to the fact that we never got to play the game at a high level and fulfil our childhood ambition of playing for our team. Instead, we live our lives vicariously through 11 brave men who take to the field and represent the 12-year-old inside each of us who dreamed about banging in the winner at Wembley as we kicked the ball against the garage doors down the street.
While my brain can not fully understand a man’s reasoning for not liking football, I do not feel any anger towards them. In fact, I both pity and envy them.
Pity because I can’t imagine going through my life and not having something to feel so passionate about. Sure, they can find their interest in art or music, but Mona Lisa didn’t run from the halfway line in the Nou Camp and score a last-gasp goal to take Chelsea through to the Champions League final. However, I envy them because they will never feel the pain that we face, the borderline between agony and ecstasy so fine.
John Terry’s penalty against Manchester United in the Champions League final is the ultimate example of this – had he rolled it in, we would have had a lifetime of joy.
Instead, we have a lifetime of constant reminders of when we came so close. Every time I see that replay, another part of me dies inside.
No matter what level we played at, for us each game was the most important one we would ever play.
And though playing in a glorified pub team league, at night and several times a day I find myself thinking of chances in games that I failed to convert, knowing that I have to live with it and can never change the moment that I was sent through one-on-one with only the keeper to beat and scuffed my shot into his thankful hands.
These moments haunt me on the same level I like to imagine Stevie Gerrard is haunted by his fateful slipping incident.
Luckily, my miss wasn’t watched live by one hundred million people, nor did it become an internet sensation sparking off memes and videos that would mock the sheer devastating scale of it all – I only had to face ten despairing team-mates and a manager who couldn’t make eye contact with me after the match.
Despite the positives, and there were plenty to be proud of in my playing life, it is hard as a footballer and fan not to get caught up in the negatives. We are the eternal pessimists. To lose a final is to live the rest of your life without closure. We all know that to be confident and sure your team will win is to put the jinx on them.
Of all the millions of fans your club might have around the world, it is your individual actions that will decide if your team will win that potentially tricky FA Cup game against Bradford or be on the wrong end of a giant-slaying.
It is just a game – I can accept that – and it often crosses my mind that, apart from quality on the pitch and quantity in the stands, the beautiful game means just as much to the people having a kickabout in the park as to those playing in a cup final.
The desire to win, the passion for the game, the simplicity of a ball, foot and a net can lift us out of the mundane and into the stratospheric.
And while future events like getting married and having children will surely be life-changing events, nothing in ‘real life’ has ever given me the same feeling as when Didier Drogba’s penalty crossed the line that night in Munich.
