by Sarah Star »
14 May 2008 20:20
Mr Optimist Sarah Star I freely admit that the first game I ever went to was our FA Cup replay in January. I'd always wanted to go to a football match, but not on my own, and hubby suggested this might be an easy one to get tickets to. Before then I just watched it on tv occasionally and had a vague interest in how Reading and Liverpool (hubby's team) were doing.
That's all changed now. When I don't go to a match I feel miserable and on edge. When I listen to our games on the radio, I feel physically sick when I think a goal is about to be scored either for or against us. I also have no interest in how any other team is doing unless it affects our results. I watch our games repeatedly on the tv. I scan the news for any mention of the team and I try to talk about Reading FC with friends and family, though most of them have no interest in football whatsoever. I love being part of a community that can organise a demonstration of 200+ people in 24 hours and that feels so passionately about the same thing as me. I am completely hooked...and maybe also a little sad, but I want a season ticket next year regardless.
Is your husband from Liverpool? Does he go and watch the Micky Mousers play? If the answers are no and no I suggest you dump him quicker than a ton of hot poo and run away with me.....!
Before being exiled from Reading and in my teens / 20s if I was not watching Reading wherever they were playing home or away, at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon I would be as miserable as sin and resentful of the reason/person that was preventing me from being at the football, I honestly thought of it as my duty to be there. I can fully relate to what you are saying, going to football can be like an addiction and the feeling of community cannot be replicated anywhere else..
Bizzarely I think that the Premier League and Mad Stad are less intimate and there is less a feeling of community than when it was 3,500 at EP, drinking in R&T & Rendezous and seeing the same 200-300 faces at away games, maybe this is why the football drug is not so addictive for me personally, and others by the sound of some of the comments on here, these days, PL or no PL.
The answers are no and no. It's more of a family tradition with him as his Dad comes from Liverpool. He also supports Gillingham as that was his childhood local team, which is where my blue and white scarf comes from.
I'm afraid I cannot dump him because he is the loveliest man I know. To prove this, he is planning on buying my first RFC season ticket for my birthday/Christmas present combined even though he says it's 'like buying a drug addict a pound of heroin'. If he hadn't come with me to see Reading play, I would never have come either. Almost everything I know about football comes from him and watching Liverpool on the telly. My family just aren't interested in sport at all.