Today I met a man in the park. He is a nice man, and I have met him many times before; we often walk our dogs at the same time and have some lovely (if often fairly one sided) conversations; today he told me about watching Jimi Hendrix above the Bristol ice rink and of the terrible winter in 1963 in which he had to make a long trek home after his bus broke down.
But the thing I love about this man is that every time he sees me, he always opens with the same line. Regardless of how often he has to put up with my ignorance on the subject, and no matter how often I give vague or negative replies, he will always ask, 'Did you see the football yesterday (last week/on Sunday etc.)?'
Now, I've gotten better at this - since living with a football fan, and especially since getting Sky Sports, I find it almost impossible to cruise through life on my complete ignorance of the sport and all the associated expected knowledge. I was able, for example, to today respond that yes even though I had been asleep for most of it, I was at least in front of a screen whilst the Manchester game was happening yesterday. Admittedly, this simply provoked a deeper conversation concerning the absurdities of lauding City's chances of winning the league so early in the season, along with several examples of other teams for whom this had happened previously. None of which I understood, and was left floundering hopelessly until I settled back on a change of subject to that most universal of subjects; the weather.
Unsurprisingly, this universal masculine greeting has always thwarted my chances of opening the doors to the society which it guards. Except once.
For those who don't know, a few years back I worked as a teacher in a high security prison. It was fun work, and needless to say it offered the opportunity to meet some interesting people (which is a whole other post in itself); one of these people was a young lad nicknamed 'fingers' (originality was not, it seemed, a pre-requisite to entering Her Majesty's finest). Now Fingers was, even to my 25 years, a young kid trying to keep face in an adult prison, in on some minor theft charge or other - you couldn't help but like him, even as a moral obligation to the merciless, if subtle (at least when the screws/civvies were around) teasing at the hands of the other inmates. Don't get the wrong idea - he gave as good as he could get, and I think was for the most part left alone on account of his, for want of a better word, simpleness - but he was not exactly a block leader.
One day Fingers asked which team I support. I gave my stock answer; that I didn't watch, understand or have any interest in football at all. He was floored. It seemed this had some great effect on Fingers, his face betrayed his inability to grapple with a totally new concept and, it must be said, he failed.
"Yeah, but if you did support a team...."
"But I don't"
"But if you did, who would it be?"
I gave up. Luckily, I also have a stock reply for this style of interrogation also.
"Well I guess that as I come from Cardiff, if I had to support any team, it would be them."
Problem dealt with, we moved on. Fingers seemed satisfied, and he was released from the existential nightmare of having to face a world in which men didn't like football. I was off the hook, and resumed my teaching.
Only the hook refused to budge, and moving on wasn't an option. The next time I saw Fingers he was beaming; this was because, as I was to find out, his team (one of the Bristols) had beaten 'my' team. And he was over the moon about it.
"Did you see the hammering we gave you on the weekend!" This never phrased as a question. However....
"Errr.....no?"
"When (player) did this, and (your player) did that, we made you look like idiots." He didn't appear to have registered the fact that I hadn't seen it.
Ultimately, I realised the futility of trying to explain my ignorance and joined in. The beauty of it all was, I didn't even have to pretend to know what the fuck was going on; he did it all for me. All that was required was the occasional nugget of trash talk to spur him on. If told 'I' was playing someone soon, I would claim a total lack of chance of victory on the other team's behalf; if told anything negative at all about the referee, it was a prime opportunity to make some vague comment on the ineptitude of authorities, which would ring positively on many levels.
Soon other inmates would be involved. I would obviously have to drift out if any serious conversation about the sport took place (the knowledge these people had! They could barely spell but knew hundreds of players, teams, stats, scorelines for years gone by) but, if only because the break in the boredom of prison life was worth humouring the middle class white boy for a few moments in the day, I generally got by. And for a few months, I was in the club.
I don't think I could do it for long though. I don't think my dog walking friend will notice any real increase in footballing knowledge in the near future, nor will any new compatriate receive anything but a wan smile and vague dislodging of the subject should they ever try to make football smalltalk. I mean, that would require actually watching the damn thing.
I leave you with a re-enactment of my first ever football discussion with Fingers...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1WN0YMWZU (for some reason HTML doesn't seem to be working!)
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