‘Football is a religion.’ — we have all heard this adage; or the Indian version — ‘Cricket is a religion, xyz is the god’. But then cricket in India is owned and controlled by a huge nexus of politicians and businessmen, with none less than the son of the most powerful right wing politician in the country at the helm of the board. It’s murky. Let’s set that aside now and talk about a hilarious aspect of sports — club football fans who follow a club which is not local to them, fans who follow a club from a different country altogether and talk about it in possessive nouns.
I do follow club football, albeit sporadically. I too have a club of ‘mine’ although I never use possessive pronouns when I talk about it. I chose it randomly to irk my flatmates who were all followers of another club (and also since ‘my’ club has a blue jersey and blue happens to be my favourite colour). Let me be clear, I don’t have any emotional connect with that club. But if you were to follow a league with games every week for most part of the year, then it makes sense to pick a team and follow the season along with that team. However, what I don’t understand is how Person A from Erattupetta (who is a die hard fan of a club from North west England) can have a tiff with Person B from Cherpulassery (who happens to be a die hard fan of a club from Southern England) and be extremely rude, cruel and emotional about it. Mind you, these clubs are at least a 100 years older than both A and B and there is nothing, absolutely nothing that links them with these far away cities of our erstwhile colonial masters.
Some might insist that they follow these clubs because of the certain style of football that they play. That is a stupid argument because if you look closely just the last two decades you can find nothing that has stayed same — not the style, not the players, and not even the owners in the case of some of the bigger clubs. A few clubs have become better and climbed the ladder. They started playing amazingly well, with some of the greatest footballers joining them. Obviously that meant new fans. The followers of the older club then mock them calling them ‘plastics’, which makes me wonder if they actually started following the older clubs because they read their histories? From my experience in irritating the die hard fans of the older clubs one thing I have noticed is that quite a majority of them follow these clubs because of a bandwagon mentality. Also, maybe because they make excellent t-shirts, aftershaves, and towels.
P.S.:- India does not do well in international football and that in a way gives us Indians an opportunity to support any other team. It’s not the case with cricket though. While we were kids, we were allowed to support almost any other team that we liked — Australia, West Indies and to a certain extent even Pakistan. But now that India is on the verge of returning to the post of super power which it was in pre-history, our options are limited. Add to that, now with the nationalist poster boy Kohli as the skipper of the Byjus BCCI Indian cricket team, supporting any other team or even uttering that the players from any other team are good will get you the anti-national who should leave India stamp.
Disclaimer: Persons A from Erattupetta and B from Cherpulassery are fictional. But if you do indeed exist, please forgive me in case I mentioned ‘your’ teams wrongly.
