Cast my mind back four years

If I cast my mind back four years, give or take a few days, perhaps, and I’m getting ready to go to the football, Bristol Rovers v Someone. I’ve long fallen out of love with the Rovers, but two things keep drawing me in. I have a long-standing gig writing an article for the matchday programme but far more importantly I am meeting with my mates, some of whom I only get to see at the football. And I love everything except the football.

I have lost the precious ability to watch the game with just the one eye open, the essential requisite of the true fan. The referee always gives soft penalties to the opposition and fails to give blatant ones to us. Yellow and red cards are always harsh when we get them but totally deserved for the visitors. In fact, the referee is always an ‘awayer’ when we’re at home and a ‘homer’ when we’re away. But my automatic bias, always in plain sight, has deserted me. Watching a game, almost dispassionately, is unsustainable for me and utterly pointless. Something has to give and that is me.

Back in the early 2000s, an old pal told me he had started to lose the emotional attachment to the Rovers to the extent that he no longer wanted to attend matches. I couldn’t understand him at all. How was this possible? I had been at Rovers, either side of my less than stellar playing career on the parks of Bristol, and it was and would always be my club. I would arrange, and even miss, social events and even arrange holidays around games and think nothing of it. All that mattered on a Saturday was meeting up with my mates at the football, having a few ciders and watching an inevitably disappointing game. Then, politics got in the way.

In 2006, there was a boardroom split and I took sides with the good guys, who lost. It affected me in ways I could never imagine it would or even should. I was removed from writing for the matchday programme – hardly surprising given what I was saying publicly about the direction of the club – and axed from the Bristol Evening Post for which I had started writing a column about the Rovers. I later learned that a senior official from the club had asked the editor to have me removed and they happily obliged. Without evidence, I felt this was the end of any literary career that might come my way and I became bitter and twisted.

Then, the new owner and chairman banned a former director who had become a close and trusted friend from attending games. For as long as he remained banned, I decided to stay away. Totally my decision, not discussed with anyone; a rather sad one-man boycott which hardly anyone knew or cared about.

I was certainly missing Saturdays because I was rarely seeing old friends and relatively new ones, but my passion for the club was waning. When Rovers were bought by a Jordanian banker, Wael al Qadi, in 2016, I returned to the terraces and was even reinstated to the programme. On the face of it, I was back for good, but in my heart of hearts, I knew I wasn’t. And by 2018, my desire to not be at games was such that I knew I had to call it a day.

In 2021, Rovers appointed ex jailbird and all round wrong ‘un Joey Barton as manager and any thoughts I might have had about resurrecting my support for the club disappeared altogether. Whether I would have been so principled as to not attend games in my passionate supporting days, I don’t know. I’d probably have still gone but that was then, this is now. I felt when he joined that it was the most disgraceful appointment in the history of the club and nothing that has happened since has changed my mind. If Barton takes the club to the Premier League and wins the Champions League, I will not be there.

I should be in the pub today chewing the cud (Google cud to see what it is!) and having far too much cider that’s good for me before cheering on Joey Barton’s blue and white army to victory against a dirty cheating team and a biased referee who might as well be wearing opposition colours. Instead, I’ll be doing something, or more likely nothing, else.

Of course I miss the match day. But that’s gone, over a long time ago. And I’m finally over it.