I guess having the international break from the Premiership and Championship has made me realise how much I base my weekend around football, how much I practically live for football. Over this weekend, I went to a comedy night, a last-ever concert with my choir, an Oxfam shift and my brother's 30th birthday dinner (thought I'd mention that to wind him up, don't worry, I offered him a herbal tea and a werthers original to cheer him- no pleasing some people).
You would expect my mind to be on other things; the truth is, throughout all of this, I was constantly checking my Sky Sports Score Centre app on my phone for the scores, only to find Scotland were drawing 0-0 with Serbia and Crawley Town were playing Portsmouth tommorrow. It was a bit thin on the ground, I'm not gonna lie.
You would expect my mind to be on other things; the truth is, throughout all of this, I was constantly checking my Sky Sports Score Centre app on my phone for the scores, only to find Scotland were drawing 0-0 with Serbia and Crawley Town were playing Portsmouth tommorrow. It was a bit thin on the ground, I'm not gonna lie.
When I think now, about 80% of my mind is probably full of pointless football games from the past that will never be of any use to me, about 17% is random song lyrics and the other 3% are things like when peoples birthdays are, what peoples names are at a stage in our relationship where it becomes too embarrassing to ask, and stuff I remember from school. I need to rearrange my data storage.
I digress. I feel like there's something kind of comforting about football, it has a reassuring quality to it, there's always hope, always something to look forward to. For example, if your team is in a relegation battle in May, I think it's kind of okay either way. If you stay up, you can celebrate, if you go down, there's always next season to look forward to and the challenge for promotion again in August, whilst deep down you know your life isn't actually that bad.
Maybe it's because I'm a Birmingham City fan that I feel like this. Maybe because of all the promotions and relegations we've experienced, as time goes by you learn to neutralise it in your mind. You just get used to it to the point where it's no longer a shock, just a mild shame. Us getting relegated is becoming the equivalent of going to the supermarket and forgetting your bag for life. It's a bit of a pain, you get annoyed about it for a couple of minutes and then go home.
If there were two things Birmingham City needed to become an established Premiership club, I say two things because of the financial situation at the club with Carson Yeung and everything, but the other would be the sense of negativity around the place. We take a kind of weird pride in being crap, and having seen so many disastrous seasons take place, it becomes a part of our rich heritage. So many men in the Prince of Wales pub talk about getting relegated io the third division in 1989 at the same sort of time Aston Villa were challenging for the Premiership title, and stoicly watching rubbish football to the bitter end.
I'd like to compare our fans songs to those of other clubs. Manchester United have a song called: 'Glory, glory Man United': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUCn4w-S2KM
That talks about the busby babes, when they won the FA Cup, all of their trophies and how famous they are.
This is a song called 'when the blues win the cup': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9r65OcUxzQ
About a sad old man sitting in the corner of a pub wishing Birmingham City would win the cup- doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Thankfully we don't sing this song at matches, but even 'keep right on' which is what we are most well known for has an element of tragic heroship about it. Some lyrics to that song are:
As you go through life,
it's a long, long road,
there'll be joys and sorrows too
Some Blues fans sing this with such passion and commitment, I think a part of us are proud of how rubbish we are but how we stick it out through everything. Here's a video I've found of a group of our fans singing after losing away at Coventry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCsIqb3KM6k
Only Birmingham City fans could pay all that money, watch us lose to our semi-rivals who were one of the worst teams in the league at that time and still want to sing. If Aston Villa lost to Coventry, their fans would spend the whole journey back like some pissed off wife, not saying anything to each other and not making eye contact. But then again, they probably wouldn't lose to Coventry in the first place.
I don't know what it is about the Birmingham City mentality that sort of expects failure. It's possibly that, maybe Barry Fry aside, we've rarely had a manager that got us to play good football, possibly because of that period of time in the late 80s/early 90s when we were still in the third division whilst having to watch west brom, wolves and villa all above us, maybe all the play-off disappointments under Trevor Francis in the late 90s- there have been a lot of periods of time, particularly in the play-off defeats, where things were looking promising for us and then we miss a penalty and everything falls apart again. Maybe all of our fans hopes for the future are buried by fear for another Chris Holland moment.
That's why I was so disappointed Chris Hughton left. Over the last season, it was almost like he was gradually getting a positive atmosphere at the club- the fans were undergoing psychotherapy with trust exercises. We were beginning to hope that in spite of everything happening off the pitch with the board, in spite of having to play midweek European games with a small squad, in spite of being relegated the season before with a defensive, McLeish-esc outlook, we could still build a team to be proud of completely from free transfers, loan signings and youngsters off the academy. And we did. We finished 4th in the second division with no money, purely built on grit and determination.
And then we lost to Blackpool in the play-off semi-finals and one of our greatest ever managers left us. Right, I'm off to go and watch Halesowen Town.
If there were two things Birmingham City needed to become an established Premiership club, I say two things because of the financial situation at the club with Carson Yeung and everything, but the other would be the sense of negativity around the place. We take a kind of weird pride in being crap, and having seen so many disastrous seasons take place, it becomes a part of our rich heritage. So many men in the Prince of Wales pub talk about getting relegated io the third division in 1989 at the same sort of time Aston Villa were challenging for the Premiership title, and stoicly watching rubbish football to the bitter end.
I'd like to compare our fans songs to those of other clubs. Manchester United have a song called: 'Glory, glory Man United': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUCn4w-S2KM
That talks about the busby babes, when they won the FA Cup, all of their trophies and how famous they are.
This is a song called 'when the blues win the cup': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9r65OcUxzQ
About a sad old man sitting in the corner of a pub wishing Birmingham City would win the cup- doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Thankfully we don't sing this song at matches, but even 'keep right on' which is what we are most well known for has an element of tragic heroship about it. Some lyrics to that song are:
As you go through life,
it's a long, long road,
there'll be joys and sorrows too
Some Blues fans sing this with such passion and commitment, I think a part of us are proud of how rubbish we are but how we stick it out through everything. Here's a video I've found of a group of our fans singing after losing away at Coventry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCsIqb3KM6k
Only Birmingham City fans could pay all that money, watch us lose to our semi-rivals who were one of the worst teams in the league at that time and still want to sing. If Aston Villa lost to Coventry, their fans would spend the whole journey back like some pissed off wife, not saying anything to each other and not making eye contact. But then again, they probably wouldn't lose to Coventry in the first place.
I don't know what it is about the Birmingham City mentality that sort of expects failure. It's possibly that, maybe Barry Fry aside, we've rarely had a manager that got us to play good football, possibly because of that period of time in the late 80s/early 90s when we were still in the third division whilst having to watch west brom, wolves and villa all above us, maybe all the play-off disappointments under Trevor Francis in the late 90s- there have been a lot of periods of time, particularly in the play-off defeats, where things were looking promising for us and then we miss a penalty and everything falls apart again. Maybe all of our fans hopes for the future are buried by fear for another Chris Holland moment.
That's why I was so disappointed Chris Hughton left. Over the last season, it was almost like he was gradually getting a positive atmosphere at the club- the fans were undergoing psychotherapy with trust exercises. We were beginning to hope that in spite of everything happening off the pitch with the board, in spite of having to play midweek European games with a small squad, in spite of being relegated the season before with a defensive, McLeish-esc outlook, we could still build a team to be proud of completely from free transfers, loan signings and youngsters off the academy. And we did. We finished 4th in the second division with no money, purely built on grit and determination.
And then we lost to Blackpool in the play-off semi-finals and one of our greatest ever managers left us. Right, I'm off to go and watch Halesowen Town.
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