He who cares, wins

The accident of birth, as we all know, is what determines how the greater part of our lives will pan out. Whether we will be rich or poor is largely determined by which household we are born into. Whether we are destined to be lawyers or goatherds depends not so much on our ability to retain vast volumes of legal information, or our affinity with goats, and more on the global co-ordinates of our birthplace.

I think it was Dustin Hoffman who was asked, 'who is the best actor in the world?', replying that it was probably a shoe maker in some remote part of eastern Russia, his point being that the world that is visible to us is only that tiny portion which circumstance has allowed to peek through.

Like most small kids, I assumed that the world I could see was all there was and that everything that existed could be fairly compared from my privileged position. The definition of a poor person was someone who couldn't afford to go on the school trip and failure in life consisted of not being rich, famous, or personally known to me. And the ultimate sadness that our cruel world could bestow on a person was to be a supporter of a rubbish football team.

This was particularly ironic as I first entered the football world as an accidental fan of QPR. Even back then, in the sepia world of the seventies, the glory days of Stan Bowles, Gerry Francis and Phil Parkes, QPR were, by most people's standards, fairly rubbish.

My mother was to blame, asking if I wanted “a bag like that” while pointing vaguely across the schoolyard at some other child. I saw a kid with a shiny leather satchel and decided that, yes, that was for me. What I got, and I was not happy about it, was a blue canvas duffel bag bearing the letters 'Q', 'P' and 'R' under a crude stick man drawing of a bloke about to kick a football. Curses on her. As Lou Reed once said, you can't always trust your mother.

As the football bug bit deeper I devoured everything to do with the game and found rich pickings at the back of Shoot magazine where detailed statistics were printed for the whole of the Football League. It revealed a world into which Match of the Day dared not tread, evidence of strange teams like Halifax Town and Crewe Alexandra. The surnames of goalscorers hinted at the fact that people, real human beings, actually played for such teams and the paltry attendance figures confirmed that some people even went to see them.

I was shocked. While lenten Trocaire boxes were handed out in school in the hope that our naive consciences would be directed towards the poor of Africa, my middle class sympathies went, instead, to these poor creatures, huddled on the broken terraces of Mansfield Town and, God forbid, Scunthorpe United. Why Lord, is your world such a cruel and unforgiving place? Surely these were the people that really needed our help.

How could they do it? What kind of life was that? My heart broke for them. But gradually my world view widened and I began to appreciate that the Fans of Lesser Teams tribe included me. Botherers of Manchester United and Liverpool shook their heads in pity and ridicule as I worried about QPR's parlous state at the foot of the old First Division and wondered whether this new kid, Clive Allen, would be good enough to save us from the shame of relegation. He wasn't.

It became clear to me that other peoples lack of understanding had no bearing on the pleasure and pain that those idiosyncratic Londoners dealt out to me every Saturday. Then I discovered the League of Ireland and even my closest friends gave up hope. “There’s no point”, they would say to each other with just a hint of bitterness, “he doesn’t want to be helped”.

That wasn’t strictly true. There were times when I desperately wanted to be something else. Like when my Man Yoo supporting brother was preparing for yet another Cup final, or when the pure footballing power of Bob Paisley’s Liverpool teams made me want desperately to be part of that particular family. But you can’t choose family, can you? The truth was that I just didn’t care in the same way that I did about my own scruffy life partners.

Supporting a team, any team, isn’t about cantilever stands or tv coverage. It has nothing to do with the elegance or power of the players that wear the shirt. Nor should have anything to do with the size of the trophy cabinet or even the persuasions of your friends. It is simply and beautifully at the mercy of whatever it may be that makes you care more than reason should allow.

In 1984, standing on the grass bank below the stand at Flower Lodge, I watched in misery as Cork City were dismantled 3-0 by a Shamrock Rovers team that would go on to win the league that year. Rovers had been the team that introduced me to the League, I had been to Milltown three times before my family, my real family, upped sticks and moved South. I could have been one of them, I thought.

On April 21st 1991 I stood on the bank at Turner’s Cross and watched Tom McNulty take away our title and wheek it away up north to Oriel Park. My friends were all in the pub, swigging pints and celebrating as some great event from across the water unfolded on the television. Only in retrospect can I console myself with the fact that if I had been with them, watching Arsenal or Man United or Liverpool or whoever it was, I wouldn’t have cared.

No, I was part of the paltry crowd that would no doubt be listed at the back end of some magazine that some kid might read and wonder to himself, why?