This has developed into an interesting thread. Football has always left me utterly cold, but I'm aware that this is more to do with me than anything inherently dull in the game itself, and I'm interested in why it presses so many buttons for some people while passing others by. GGM's posts, in particular, struck a few chords:
There's a familial thing; my dad and most of his family ar football-mad, and I grew up seeing Match of The Day and hearing about West Bengal and Leeds United, my dad's two teams.
Which ties into it being:
-part of the comforting background noise of my childhood
-an inheritance from/connection to, along with many other things that interest me, of my immigrant Anglicised Bengali roots
-one of the only (as per Nick Hornby and Duncan, above) stable modes of communication between my dad and I, over the years, and further, a familial activity that my dad, bro-in-law and I can share.
This slides for me into a pull connected to gender thing, in that as father of two girls, my dad presumed he'd never have any company on the sofa on a Saturday night. He's delighted to be wrong!
As a bit of a poser I enjoy being surprising in being a female british asian football fan. Also it fitted the 'tomboyish' concerns that were a large part of my early attempts at self-definition. It plugged into me on a level that was connected subterraneously with 'not being a proper girl'/emulating&connecting with masculinity.
My experience is perhaps the flipside of this. My father was also passionately into football - watching it and playing it. He came from a working class Scottish family and won a sports scholarship to a fairly prestigious private school, at which he was thoroughly miserable, so I guess it played a pivotal role in his life - and he expected his only son to be as keen on the game as he was.
I wasn't. Ever.
I'm not sure why I was unable to summon up even the slightest bit of enthusiasm for kicking a ball about, or watching other people kick a ball about. God knows it wasn't a rebellious thing: as a pre-teen, I really tried to learn the rules, develop the skills, conquer my instinct to run away from the shouty people and the muddy missile hurtling in my direction (I had glasses, and was always terrified of the ball hitting me in the face - which did happen a couple of times). My father tried too, taking me for a 'kick-about' in the park (until my mother eventually pointed out to him that I was hating it), taking me to see Aberdeen play (weird mixture of deadening boredom, feeling cowed by scary bellowy blokes and doing my my best to conceal my yawning) and organising a football-themed eighth birthday party (I got distracted by wanting to pick daisies).
I've heard the same story from so many gay men that it's difficult to imagine this inability to 'get' football isn't related in some way to male homosexuality - or, at least, a subset thereof. As with some other gay men, eventually I stopped trying and began making a geekily snobbish virtue of my inability to enjoy (or even understand the enjoyment of others in) the beautiful game. Entering the stroppy zithell of adolescence, my inability (perceived as refusal) to persevere with playing football became a hard little kernel, around which a more general resentful non-communication accreted. My father was horribly disappointed, for many years, in his effeminate, 'non-physical' son who wouldn't even have a go, and even now I associate football (and, to a lesser extent, most other sports, especially team sports) with crushing shame.
So... family, class and gender. Whereas football was an avenue of comfort, familial communication and expression of gender difference for you, for me it was the exact opposite. I'd say my early experiences poisoned the game for me, but I'm not sure I'd 'ever' have got it. The fact that, as a boy in the 1970s, I was absolutely expected to 'get' it made me hate it. |
) and me, the Asian, female, and only Leeds fan.
