Supporting West Ham this season has been so full of drama and surprise, it’s been like living in the Book of Revelation. A brief summary. Last season the newly promoted team of Young Turks put together by our decent manager Alan Pardew feared no one. We finished a vertiginous ninth in the Premiership and got to within a whisker of winning the FA Cup final. It was a wonderful, unbelievable season. Even the doubting Thomases among us (given our history of glorious failure, that’s most of us) succumbed to cautious optimism for the future.
This season it’s been like watching a car crash in slow motion. Wealth and unaccustomed success, it turns out, has ruined our team of young millionaires. First, laid-back centre half Anton Ferdinand is charged with violent disorder, of all places, outside Faces nightclub in Ilford High Road. Next he tells the manager he wants a couple of days off training to visit his sick grandma on the Isle of Wight, then he flies out to South Carolina for a 22nd birthday booze-up at the Knock Knock Club.
As the season develops, a culture of gambling on the team coach when travelling to away games takes hold. Pots of £50,000 are not unusual. Matthew Etherington and goalkeeper Roy Carroll seek professional help for their gambling addiction. Rumours begin to circulate about the decent manager’s suddenly hectic love life. An unusual business deal worth £33 million brings two Argentinian internationals to the club. One of these, Carlos Tevez, is South American Footballer of the Year. Hopes soar. The decent manager refuses to play him. A clique of sullen players fall out with the decent manager and refuse to play. A consortium of property developers offers to buy the club. An Icelandic businessman with an incredible dome-shaped bald head buys it instead and sacks the decent manager. A new manager, a local man with a proven record, is brought in. The clique of sulky players refuse to play for him as well.
The players that do take the field appear to have forgotten how to kick a football. Some seem only interested in jumping into their baby Bentleys after the game and heading for the nearest casino. For a while it’s impossible to open a tabloid without seeing a photograph of a West Ham striker snogging a Page Three girl. No doubt if I’d been earning £30,000 a week at their age, I’d have been the same, if not worse. But when you are paying £50 a time to watch these blokes play football, and your team is a substitute for religion, and they just can’t be bothered, you can’t help becoming a little judgmental.
Although West Ham are anchored at the foot of the table, a national laughing stock, and playing like a team of ruptured goats, every match is a sell-out. It must be the fascination of the horrible. On Sunday, however, I managed to get hold of a ticket for the match at home against Spurs. (It was given me by a man whose wife’s number has come up on the national lottery, and he, sensible fellow, was off to Antigua to forget.) I went along with a heavy heart, not expecting much. The sky was black, the Tube journey was difficult, and, to make matters worse, I had an accident in my trousers on the way to the ground.
Barring miracles, West Ham United are already relegated from the Premiership. So when the team came out on to the pitch we roundly booed them and settled back in our seats to witness yet another hopeless debacle by 11 spoiled children. Three rows in front of me an elderly West Ham supporter, evidently beyond hope, or even beyond despair, drew out a notepad and began sketching in leisurely charcoal. A chap to my left resignedly lit up a joint.
And true to the unpredictable nature of West Ham football club, there then came another twist in the plot. They came out and battled as if their lives, or at any rate their pre-match wagers, depended on victory. We gaped in disbelief. The sketching pensioner’s stick of charcoal hesitated uncertainly above the page. The team was playing for the shirt with pride! We stood up in our seats. We roared. We sang. We shouted foul and racist abuse at any Spurs player who came near. Why start battling now, when it’s probably already too late, no one stopped to ask — our love affair with West Ham was rekindled. They still lost 4–3, the tossers, conceding a soft goal in the last minute. Five West Ham players were booked for aggressive play of one kind or another, one for throwing himself into the crowd with his shirt off, sparking off a crowd disturbance, during which several arrests were made, for which the club will be fined £25,000. But they tried, love ’em, oh, how they tried.
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