The Journey begins

Like a lot of people, I’m just about to embark on a month of watching a lot of football. People who know me would say that I could write this sentence at the beginning of any month in any year since around 1970 and I take their point. I watch a fair bit of football. Not as much as my friend Sean who regularly goes to watch his team live and then comes home and watches the entire game again. And possibly the highlights later on if it’s been a particularly good day. But still a fair bit of football.
Of course, the month I’m about to embark on involves England playing in a major tournament and that’s a completely different level of pain from my club team. I’ve watched all the tournaments that England have been involved in since the European Championships in 1980 and as we all know, every single one of them have ended in crushing disappointment. 1986, 1990 and 1996 were particularly bad but they’ve all let me down one way or the other.
Of course I keep coming back for more. I essentially have no choice. What else am I going to do for a month? I might watch a bit of tennis and cricket but if there’s a major football tournament happening, I can’t just pretend that I’m not interested. That being the case, I thought I’d write a daily blog for my own and hopefully your amusement. I’m not getting paid for it but I’m sure I’ll find some consolation in being slagged off on social media for expressing an opinion.
As this is the first instalment, I thought I’d lay down a few ground rules for what you might expect.
No tactical analysis - I’ll try and stick with this one even though amongst football fans, I like to think I have an above average understanding of the game. But then, which of us doesn’t? We all think that we could manage a football team as well as or better than people who manage football teams for a living. Essentially, we think that just because we’ve watched thousands of hours of something, that means we’ll be good at doing that thing. If that was the case, I’d make an excellent lesbian lover. And I’d also speak passable German.
Now I come to think about it, there are no other ground rules.
So here I am again on the brink of another roller coaster ride which will inevitably end in disillusion and bitterness and the feeling that I really should invest my energy into something more rewarding. Like paying attention to my family. Or learning to play the piano. What I’m saying is I really should know better.
The trouble is that even though I’m no longer twelve years old but into my fifties, I have an optimistic outlook and I travel hopefully into each tournament. Even though I watched the warm up game against Portugal last week with a weary sense of deja-vu and that sinking feeling I get around a week before a major tournament when I realise our manager has no idea what our best team/formation might be. Even though we’ve only taken seven defenders and I’m not sure about any of them. And even though I’ve been watching England for forty years and it ALWAYS goes tits up, in spite of all of this, I can’t help feeling that you never know. Since Leicester City won the league title, we can all truly say that miracles do happen. Maybe something magical will unfold in France from next week and Wayne Rooney will lift the trophy in Paris in July after we thrash the Germans in the final. Stranger things have happened. Not much stranger I’d admit but still.
I honestly don’t know if it’s better to be this way or not. I have friends who are all doom and gloom already and the tournament hasn’t even started. “We’ll never get out of the group” they say or “Rooney can’t play in a team behind Vardy and Kane” they opine on the basis of sixty minutes of football, or even “why isn’t Andy Carroll in the squad?” on the basis of one decent game he played for West Ham against Arsenal. They may well be right but who wants to be right? Give me a large dollop of naive optimism followed by a grim dose of reality any day of the week.
So, I’ll post once a day from now until the end of the tournament and I’ll keep going even if England get knocked out. You might not want to read it any more but as a comic who’s been to the Edinburgh festival, I’m more than used to performing to an empty room. In the next few days, I’ll get into the nitty gritty of the tournament and I may even make a prediction based on nothing more than gut feeling and personal prejudice. But in the meantime, hello.