Rivalries 2
All things associated with the game of football that provoke passion look to an outsider as inherently childish. The mere thought of a grown man in face paint and a blue wig crying already has me laughing on the inside but putting it in the context of it happening on the last day of the season because his team got relegated on goal difference; I suddenly find myself feeling an empathy to this unknown individual. Without doubt, it’s an emotional boundary we only allow ourselves to cross for proper sport like football.
Football in particular is an environment exclusive to all kinds of warped behaviour; and it’s a sport that has rolled with the cultural punches. Rivalry in football is the most fantastic example of a childish aspect of the sport. We’re talking club rivalry of course. History of success between a certain country’s top two clubs, all the way to religion. Rivalry makes the sport all the richer as it adds a competitive edge beyond trophies, and as we get older, we learn more about the game and attach our learned judgments to the bias of childhood.
It can turn nasty depending on the stakes but the most pure form of
rivalry is that which exists in the week before derby day in the school
rooms of those in the last year of primary school or the first year of
secondary school. Ideally, between two sides in the lower leagues where nobody really cares (sorry, I’m a Premier League snob) and the result never really matters. That’s where it is born.
For the week before, you found yourself aligned to the school prick just because he supported the same team as you, even if you thought you were a bigger fan because you had the new kit and came to the first PE lesson of the school year in it, and he only had the market version (and even though he proper twatted you last week). Or even worse, last years kit (oh 9 year old self – if you’d only realised retro was cool. If you’d only realised staying the same size and weight would have saved you a fortune from classicfootballshirts when you were 20 years and 10 stone heavier). But, allies you were, against “the Pigs” (each side were the Pigs). Ah, the Pigs.
It may seem an adult convention to wear the same boxer shorts as you wore since the last time your team lost but it all derives from the playground where you would go through the superstitious ritual of playing “Red Pigs v Blue Pigs” in the belief that your result would somehow affect that of the one on Saturday. “We’ll score a last minute winner just like that”. It might get a bit nasty, with a few fists thrown after a dodgy tackle, but no matter who won the fight, you knew that the real winners, the winners of the war, would be the supporters of the victorious team on Saturday.
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