Does India have real football fans?

Glory hunters or true fans?

My Mom is a dear, but she can be very trying at times. Aside from committing the marked blasphemy of not letting me watch the occasional match (some nonsense about ‘studying’ and ‘making my career’) she has also repeatedly advised me to ‘support the winning team no?’ when Arsenal are losing and I’m swearing. After giving her the look of deepest disgust, I continue with the procession of scowls and sobs as Arsenal meander about the pitch as if on a picnic and get picked apart. When she gives me the same advice five minutes later, I calmly explain that changing teams and changing the house curtains are dissimilar and it would, as a result, be impossible for me to shift loyalties. ‘But it’s not like the Indian cricket team. You don’t HAVE to support them’ she now says patiently, drawing from me another prized look of revulsion. Partly because I don’t want to be associated with the Indian cricket team in any possible way and partly because, well she’s kind of right.

But I’m skipping a bullet point or two here. If you click on this link (read the article if you have a screw loose, or want to have it wobbled about a bit) and scroll down to the quite colourful debate I had with an Emirates visiting Arsenal fan, you can see why I’m having this ‘real fans’ train of thought. I realise that the argument in question was –

• A one-off

• With the other bloke being a gonorrhea-ridden, xenophobic, big-headed, incestuous volcanocunt (It’s such a relief to finally be able to cuss! Please allow swearing on your forum, 11Gunners)

(UPDATE: It seems most of the comments have been deleted by now. Well, good riddance to bad rubbish. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the guy in question was pond life)

I also realize that the argument went off in a rather weird tangent towards the end (apologies to any British fans taking offence). But I would just like to state the case for football fans from India (and other parts of the subcontinent) in case anyone is shooting dubious glances over here regarding the authenticity of our support.

For starters, any football team isn’t like the Indian cricket team, as my Mom correctly stated. The meaning being that we don’t have any intrinsic reason to support a particular football team. We don’t have fathers supporting Wolverhampton, uncles supporting Aston Villa or stern-faced grandfathers who hand us a Leeds jersey and tell us to wear it. A lot of us wish we did, me included (apologies to any family members taking offence), but due to this lack of a team being embedded into us at a young age, most football fans here start off due to the most innocuous of reasons, mine being stated in the link previously given.

Now this is unavoidable as some reason is needed to start following football. And expectedly, this facet has its vices. We have our fair share of fair-weather fans, glory hunters or call them what you will. I personally know people who have switched over to supporting Real Madrid ever since Mesut Ozil moved there, or those who act like some strange ‘Scouser by day-Gooner by night’ super-douches with smelly capes. Conversations with them can get very tedious indeed-

Me: So Chelsea got their wieners slammed through a car door, what?

X: I don’t know. I’m a Blackburn supporter now.

Me: Please mate, my jaw is already paining from eating whatever they gave us at the mess today.

X: No seriously. I’m a Roverton now.

Me: That’s not a word. And you’re actually going to support a team with El-Hadji Diouf?

X: No, I’m going to support a team that sacked Sam Allardyce.

Me: Hmm, well there is that.

X: Did you see how we beat Liverpool this week?

Me: What? That was Blackpool.

X: Balckpool?

Me: Balckpool.

X: Not Blackburn?

Me: Not in the slightest. How do-

X: Make way for another Blackpoolevudllian!

And I hope you get my drift that we have a lot of drifters. To be fair, every country has a decent-sized lot of them. They are undesirable components of civilization with self-respect lower than West Ham’s goal difference and ought to be put down with immediate effect. To all those who harp on about ‘everyone has a right to support any team at any time he wants’ and ‘each person has an opinion’, this is just my opinion i.e. drifters are douches. Because their shameless parading of ignorance on forums and networks sends across the wrong message on behalf of the entire support base.

Shift through the layer of poo garnished with Brussels sprouts at the top though, and you find gold underneath. Gold smelling slightly of poo, but gold nonetheless. Football fans who have stuck with their clubs through thick, thin and Peter Crouch. As the Down Syndrome patient I was arguing with on that link said, they are in no way ‘affiliated’ or ‘connected’ with the club, but that doesn’t stop them being ‘connected’ with it, if you know what I mean.

They don’t follow their team up and down the country to all away matches- simply because they can’t. If visiting all away matches is to be seen as some sort of badge of loyalty and hardships faced for the team, well then these people have those badges too. They wake up to watch matches till three in the night (and even odder hours in some other countries), fight off hordes of brainwashed zombies screaming ‘Cricket! Cricket!’ for the only remote in the common-room, smile when their team wins, facepalm when their team loses, tear up when a teenager has his leg snapped in two and so on and so forth. And the funny thing is that my Mom is right again. Right about the fact that they do all this, even if they don’t have to.

There’s no ingrained love for any club, no relative holding a gun to their head. But they start supporting a club (for whatever convoluted reason) and never let go. I’m not trying to say that we do our clubs a favour and deserve a pat on the back, that’s not my point at all.

I’m saying that, while the stadium-dwelling fans who travel cross-country with their team deserve much praise, just because millions of others don’t (again, can’t) doesn’t mean they should be shown V signs. I’m saying that the answer to the question the headline of this article asks is a resounding and floor-shaking yes.

So if say Arsenal play West Ham, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the Upton Park terraces or some remote village in Minsk, as long as you’re singing your heart out.

Gayness concluded.