A postponement at Hull and TV game against Watford have meant a depressing fortnight with no live football. Not a fortnight that’s been well spent either.
They say addicts will do anything for a fix, and on Saturday night I rather proved the point.
December is a tough month for everybody financially with so much food and so many presents to buy. I’d actually like to find one of these internet fraudsters I’ve heard so much about and hand my credit card over to them for a couple of weeks – they surely couldn’t do anything worse to it than I’ve managed this month.
Twice the good people at HSBC have rung me recently. Twice. “Hello sir, this is Melissa/Rebecca from HSBC calling. This is just a courtesy call as part of our online fraud protection service. We have noticed some unusually high levels of activity on your card and have temporarily locked your account.” No HSBC, I’m sorry to report that is just me, spending money I don’t have on things people I don’t like don’t need. And wrapping paper.
The Republic of Ireland is in better financial shape than me at the moment, and yet in the dark recesses of Saturday night, huddled away in a gloomy corner of LoftforWords Towers, I relapsed again. It was £36 this time. Not too bad considering the distance. I could have upgraded to first class for another tenner but that would have been gratuitous. Three clicks and it was all done. My dealer has my card details saved, I just confirm my password and it’s with me in seconds. Saturday, January 15, Burnley Manchester Road, with one change at Preston, leaves Euston at 08.40. Booked and paid for I relaxed back in my chair, I felt dirty but satisfied like an old man who’d just paid to see the Keeley Hazell sex video. Within an hour I’d booked a £24 return ticket to Blackburn. And a £27 one to Norwich. Fuck me I need help.
I’m actually meant to be working on the day we play at Burnley, and I’d resigned myself to missing that game several months ago. Then Hull was called off, and Watford moved for television, and Coventry home and away moved, and I’m sure I’ll think of something. I think I’ve only used the dead grandmother excuse once with my present employer so there’s still technically one grandmother to go and I’ve still got another period of sick leave left before the official written warning kicks in. Maybe I should just tell them I’ve got a tumour of some sort, then I could have the next six months off and be sure not to miss a game before May.
My mum once told me when I was a teenager that she wished I’d acquired a smack habit instead of QPR. “It would be cheaper and better for your health” she joked. I think she was joking. I cannot imagine many mothers driving through Scunthorpe’s Westcliff estate, gazing at the scabby wastes of space in the back alleys frantically trying to find an unspoilt vein and wishing that was her son. But then to be fair to my mum she’s now spent 40 years of her life surrounded by people who enter four days of mourning whenever QPR lose, and only emerge from it when the next game is 48 hours away. I imagine her breaking down and sobbing uncontrollably into her wine in the golf club bar as she admits to her friends that she spent her Saturday night driving to Tamworth to pick my brother and me up after our train back from Plymouth, after first being diverted to South Wales and then catching fire just outside Birmingham New Street, finally gave up the ghost and ejected us onto the pavement at a little before one in the morning. She’d probably find it easier to tell them I was in intensive care in a medically induced coma after getting my hands on some crack mixed with brick dust.
So the last fortnight has been tough. I haven’t seen, smelt or shouted at a QPR match since our glorious victory against Cardiff City at Loftus Road. I need to see QPR once a week even when Ian Baraclough and Tony Scully are gallivanting down the left wing so when they’re actually playing well a week is too long to wait and a fortnight is unbearable. Why can’t we be like baseball teams and play every night across a 160-odd game season?
I howled and wailed when they called off our game at the KC Stadium. “Health and safety Nazis” I cried, and I stand by that because I do believe that if the pitch is playable then the game should be played and it left up to the supporters to decide if it’s safe or not. If it had been played I’d have been there even if I’d had to walk to Humberside through the snow. Deep down I have a repressed understanding that it’s probably people like me that they call these games off for – people too sick, stupid and addicted to know better, people who would be at the game regardless, people who need protecting from themselves. I’ll go to the rearranged game. I’ll take time off work to do it, and I’ll do so again when the inevitable weather related postponement hits one or more of the Leeds, Norwich, Blackburn or Burnley games. It’s what I do.
Missing the televised games is as responsible as I get. I still get to see the game, I don’t have to find another match reporter for LoftforWords, and I can hold it up as exhibit A for the defence when anybody questions me on my illness: “Did I go to the Watford game the other night? No. Ha. See, you’re wrong.”
I can justify my reckless purchase of train tickets for January by not going to Watford, or Coventry, and watching it on the television instead. Sadly those games don’t then make a payment back into my bank account, but it still counts despite the overdraft limit approaching like a high speed train sounding its horn.
If I’m perfectly honest I did stand in my office’s car park on Friday night at 6pm and wonder if it was possible to get down to Loftus Road from Kettering anyway. I didn’t, only because I feared I’d have a brief flash of realisation of what an arsehole I am on the way and deliberately drive my car off the road in an attempt to bring the whole sorry saga to an end. Sure family, girlfriend and the odd friend I’ve managed to keep hold of would be upset in the short term, but in years to come they’d enjoy their birthdays, Christmases and other such events without the need to consult the QPR fixture to list to find out where I would be instead, and what time I would be back.
Instead I retreated to the arm chair at LFW Towers, and watched the BBC coverage of our Watford disaster through barely parted fingers. I hate watching QPR on the television - not only because we never seem to play very well, and we always seem to get soundly thrashed by bloody Watford, but because I feel like I can do nothing about it. When I’m in my seat at the front of the F Block I have a bit of a rant and rave and tell Craig Bellamy to shut up or the linesman to get his flag in the air.
Perhaps they can hear me. Sitting in the arm chair there is no doubt - from Corby no linesman can hear you scream. Maybe it was my absence that cost us two goals; maybe my shrill northern screech would have prompted flags for the second and third goals. I blame myself.
Watching QPR on television is like watching through your patio windows while your house is burgled. The thieves rifle through your belongings making disparaging comments, “God why has he got that on DVD, and how has this defence only conceded nine goals this season” and there’s nothing you can do about it except bang on the glass and shout obscenities at arseholes who can’t hear what you’re saying.
The previous weekend was worse though. So, so much worse. The postponement at Hull changed my weekend plans from a trip north to a weekend in the south. Lindsey has just moved to Hammersmith (she has no idea how lethal that is) so I went to spend the weekend with her instead, and on the Saturday we went to the Westfield Centre. I’ve seen it of course, from the tube as I go to Loftus Road giving evils to the sappy bastards who allow themselves to be dragged there to shop while there is football being played, but I’ve never ventured inside. And I never will again.
I was confused why anybody would want to spend a Saturday there before I visited, and I’m just as clueless now. The first thing I found out that having entered the fiery pit of hell you are then only as fast as the slowest person in there. There are so many people and the place is so rammed that you just sort of shuffle around in one heaving mass. If there’s one family of fat chavs walking in a line of five across at a snail’s pace looking for JD Sports then you’re stuck behind them at that speed – you and three quarters of a million other people staring at their fat arses wobbling around in Adidas tracksuit bottoms wondering whether forced sterilisation might actually not be a bad idea.
Westfield is a clever place. It has space for three million brain dead idiots clutching credit cards, but with only a couple of exits adequate in size for a bed and breakfast on Skegness sea front catering for three visitors a day. They want to get you in there, and then trap you so you stay and spend money while trying to find a way out. If there was ever a fire thousands would die, you couldn’t clear that place in less than an hour. Mind you if you’d been in there more than ten minutes you may choose to just sit down and let yourself burn – feeling the skin peel from your face as the flames lick you your torso couldn’t possibly be any worse than queuing for 52 minutes in HMV to buy a DVD for £18 that you just know will be a fiver in about two and a half week’s time.
After the HMV farce I surrendered, took myself to the Vue Cinema and paid £3 more than I would at the same cinema chain half a mile down the road to see Monsters. Lindsey did the same, exasperated by a scrum over a crop top in H&M, which is one of the many reasons I love her. The film was disappointing, but you get on the Nemesis at Alton Towers quicker than you make a purchase in any of the shops there so it was the best thing we could have done.
How do people do this at weekends? I mean how do they stand it? My admiration to you. I obviously don’t condone gun toting rampages through innocent communities, but as my queue in HMV stretched past the half hour mark if you’d offered me a firearm I’d have been mighty tempted. “It’s for your own good” I would have cried as the massacre began. People would have thanked me.
I don’t understand how people can do that through choice, for pleasure. But then I am the idiot who thinks “wouldn’t it be nice to live in Spain” and then immediately dismisses the idea because I’d miss Loftus Road too much. And I am the selfish bastard who goes to social events, work meetings, games of golf, family functions and just about everything else apart from football merely as a way to pass the time until more football happens.
This weekend I’m back on the horse. Five of us are heading up to Leeds and I can’t wait to be back in the pub with Owain, Paul, Colin and indeed Lindsey who has long since accepted I’m a lost cause and now comes along for the social side of it ahead of the match. Weather permitting. Christ if they call this one off I think I’ll just try and drink right through to Boxing Day v Swansea.
Needless to say I’m not in favour of a mid-winter break.
What a terrible, awful shame to see loveable rogue “Big” Sam Allardyce harshly sacked by Blackburn Rovers this week. I can only presume the lack of an outcry at this decision in the media and on radio phone in programmes, such as the one afforded to Chris Hughton in similar circumstances a week before, is only due to attention being distracted by the Man Utd v Arsenal game on Monday – no other reason.
To be fair to Allardyce he may be to football what KFC is to haute cuisine but how Blackburn’s new owners expect anybody to do any better than him with a club that is a relegation waiting to happen I don’t know. Still, every cloud and all that, Allardyce can use his new found spare time to finally get those legal proceedings against the BBC started. The corporation, through Panaroma, accused Allardyce of taking bungs in transfers via his son Craig. Allardyce swore the accusations were false and his solicitors were immediately instructed, or so he said. Strangely he never quite got round to taking any action, which I’m sure is purely down to time constraints – no other reason.