On Fans

When I was a stripling, fans were something that belonged to soccer clubs and AHA. To be a fan, you either had to inhabit the terraces every Saturday afternoon, screaming and yelling abuse at your opposite numbers, while 22 men ponced around with a round ball in front of, which was almost entirely incidental. You also need to fortify yourself beforehand with a great volume of lager and meat pies. The other kind of fan was an eye-make-up wearing, quiff haired bloke in skin-tight jeans trying to look like Morton Harkett. I know. I was one of them.

But you never got fans at cricket, golf or rugby – or athletics or lawn bowls, for that matter. People who went to watch these sports were followers, supporters, ex-players etc. But not fans.
Fans have entered the world of historically more genteel sports as a result of money, SKY TV and greedy administrators, who can see no further than midway along their own snout as it is buried in the trough of revenue.

Fans are people who don’t love the game, but are enticed to follow it through the introduction of world cups, the ruination of the game through so called progressive developments designed to simplify it so that it might appeal to even the most moronic of observers.

“We need more money”, say the money men, so they destroy the sport to make it appealing to people with no empathy for it. Fans are fickle. They are enticed into a sport, lured with false promises, swell the coffers for a while then drift away when they realise they don’t like, or appreciate what they are seeing.

Fans don’t know how to behave – witness the witless Barmy Army. In NZ this week a schoolboy match erupted into a mass brawl involving hundreds of spectators. Examples too numerous to enumerate illustrate this. Fans care only about the result, not the game, or quality of play.
That difference is never better illustrated than by the difference between the fans of Cardiff City, and those who attend Welsh rugby internationals at the Millennium Stadium. At City games, they turn into animals, yet at the rugby, win or lose, Cardiff is a great place to be. And yet many of those who attend both are the same people. They love rugby, and a good game. But they are fans of City.

It is unlikely that any major sport’s administrators will turn their back on fans whilst SKY continues to pump obscene amounts of money into sport. Piped pop musak will accompany the bowlers run up at Lords. Obscene chants will be heard on the 18th green at The Masters. Results at Twickenham will be pre arranged and the matches carefully choreographed – all to keep the fans interested, whilst, lovers of the games, retreat further back into our armchairs, watching the SKY broadcast with the volume down allowing us to listen to the commentary on Radio Five Live.