Thanks – and I really mean this – for the “Why on earth aren’t you going to the Mem today?” type messages. “After all, your mate isn’t banned anymore and he’s travelling up from Devon. The old guard have nearly all gone. It’s a new era.” The answer is that it’s complicated, at least for me.
My loyal reader will know that my relationship with Bristol Rovers has been somewhat fraught throughout the past decade. The fall out from a boardroom split in 2006 – 10 years ago! – culminated in a conspiracy to have me removed from my column with the local newspaper (sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? It wasn’t) and then a friend of mine was banned by then club owner for having an opinion. The latter, in 2012, was the final straw and I decided to launch a one man boycott until the banning order was lifted, which I feared would be never. What followed was as surprising as it was welcome.
I’ve been to two games since the previous owner and his partners in incompetence departed through the side door and it was good to be back. I was welcomed as though I had never been away and the past has really passed now. I have, finally, moved on.
So, why am I not going to today’s Good Friday game against Cambridge? What with the team now in an automatic promotion position, why would I not want to go? The honest answer? My own well-being.
Bristol Rovers did not make me clinically depressed and wracked with four different types of anxiety, but they did not make things better. In fighting the illnesses, I had to rearrange my lifestyle and try to remove trigger-points and any factors that might contribute to my ill health. Going to a place, my local football club, the team I had supported for well over 40 years, had become a negative experience and in some ways it still is. On balance, I am in a better place without Bristol Rovers. This might not make any sense to you, but it does to me.
So, that’s why I am not going today and why I am probably not going again for the foreseeable, and indeed unforeseeable, future. I haven’t stopped supporting my team and my club and I am genuinely grateful of the support of so many friends at and associated with the club.
I have been ill, Bristol Rovers made me more ill and now I am trying to get better. It’s as simple, or maybe as complicated, as that.
Football really isn’t a matter of life and death and my obsession with Bristol Rovers took over too much of my life. In some ways, I am grateful to ‘certain individuals’ at the club and, indeed, at our local newspaper for changing my priorities. I did not realise that at the time, but I do now.
