Today a few friends and I watched one of them league football matches on the telly round someone’s house. This is something I do generally every five or six years, mainly to remind myself why I only watch football every five or six years. For those who may be unfamiliar with the football, it also has different monickers like soccer and ‘footie’, and is a game in which a ball is kicked up and down the field in the name of regional patriotism, by people who are generally not from the place they’re supposed to be representing.
I am not a particularly big fan of football. It seems to antagonise the people who watch it. If you were to make a tape recording of people watching a football game with the tv turned down, it would generally consist of tutting, whinging and in some cases, the loud expression of expletives. Maybe this just happens because, at the general behest of the people I am with, I always seem to wind up watching Wolves matches. But the thought of spending my leisure time, deliberately choosing to do something that makes me feel annoyance is not something I would willingly chose to do. What’d be the point in this? For me, that’d just be like a busman’s holiday. Not that football matches have ever evoked such intensity of emotion in me personally. I just generally tend to sit watching the ball being kicked about like a dispassionate observer. This doesn’t just explain my experiences as a spectator, but as a kid actually partaking in PE football matches too. So I suppose I just don’t really have any empathy with the game. Don’t get me wrong, I would rather the Wolves had won, in order to cohese the general social atmosphere with my friends. But I certainly didn’t feel empathy with the team for having lost 2-0. The nearest I got to feeling any empathy, was on the 90th minute when one of the commentators announced they had “3 minutes injury time to be endured.”
But one thing I do believe is that as uninterested as I am, I could be some sort of bad omen, a curse for my home team. I’m not kidding either. Whenever I happen to see one of their matches, they always seem to lose. Now although this sounds a coded, snide way of saying Wolves are rubbish; I know this cannot be a true statement as they’re currently top of the league. So why would they lose this match, just like they lost the last one I accidently happened to catch in 2003? Or the one before in 1997? Or the one before that in 1991? What are the odds that they would lose all those matches, even at a time when they seem to be in a winning streak? There is no other explanation – I bring bad vibes to footballers.
It may surprise you to learn that about 12 years ago, I actually used to be employed by Wolverhampton Wanders Football Club. I used to wash up plates for rich businessmen who felt they could only properly enjoy a football match whilst seated behind a glass window, eating a big three-course meal. Sometimes I had to take the kitchen rubbish out in a little trolley and wheel it to the big skips the other side of the ground. In a strange way, this was usually a shift highlight because at least you got to get out of the windowless perpetual steam-hole of the kitchen for a few minutes. But it was simultaneously rather demeaning, having to trundle through the gaggle of supporters and autograph hunters, wearing a blue overall while pushing a trolley of stinking rubbish.
I remember one day, I had made it through the fans only to be faced by a player I would later learn to be called Neil Emblen or something. He had just burst through the player’s lounge exit, all set with his autograph signing pen, to dive into a sea of adulation of the fans. The only thing blocking the player from the fans and the fans from the player, was me and my rubbish trolley. I headed left to get around him. But at the same time, he headed right and I had to halt sharply to stop from running over his toes with my trolley. Then I pushed my trolley to the right, but at the same time he walked toward his left, and we were both stopped in our tracks again. The same thing happened a third time. By now it was just embarrassing.
I don’t know if it was just co-incidence, but the next week Neil Emblen had left the team. Had the manager seen the sorry spectacle of the player’s inability to even get round the boy who washed plates and decided to dismiss him? Sadly we’ll never know.
But just maybe, the curse has lived on.
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