Mrs E and I disagree about quite a few things. The acceptable price for a pair of shoes, for example, or the relevance of musical theatre. Or the God like genius of Roddy Frame. Or whether the best way to deal with running injuries is to run through them. Or the exact amount of punishment to be meted out to people that don’t indicate at roundabouts.

And, of course, we muddle along with these disagreements, both of us occasionally conceding that the other one might have  a point, but never really getting close to agreement. And probably the subject which will ever remain separate is Why Football Is Important. 

I’m very much of the view that  the beautiful game is something that gives us structure, tragedy and unparalleled elation. She, on the other hand, goes perilously close to that hackneyed old view of it being 22 idiots pointlessly chasing a piece of leather around a field. 

So it’s unlikely that this blog will bring our views closer together, but it might present a reasonable case for the defence.

By way of background, I follow Norwich City as my team, and have done since I moved to Norwich forty years ago. I have a second team in Arsenal, because for some weird reason, several of my children support them, and I have a nodding acquaintance with West Ham, as they were the club I supported as a kid. Being a Norwich supporter has a number of conditions, the most significant of which are a need to celebrate anything bad that happens to Ipswich Town, and the ability to either moan at an international level, or patiently tolerate those around you that do. Other than that, it’s a similar club to many others. There are ups and downs, seasons of astonishing delight and seasons of despair, players and managers that you want to have a beer with, and others that you firmly wish would take their wage bill elsewhere. We (note ‘We’) are self sustaining, which means that we don’t have dodgy untraceable money coming in to prop us up, and considering our location, have a lot of fans that travel away, and a full home ground for every game. We’ve spent around half of our time in our 122 year history in the top league and about half in the second tier, with an occasional foray into what used to be called the third division, and which, confusingly, is now called league one. Plenty of supporters would like to see us in the premiership again, and the journey there in the past has been fun, but you do tend to get knocked about a bit when you get there, and being beaten up every week does jar after a while, so people like me tend to rattle on about how much more enjoyable championship football is, where passion can override technique, where there’s less of a corporate feeling to the grounds, and where, importantly, there’s no VAR. For those of you not familiar with VAR, it’s the technology that is used to challenge refereeing decisions by playing back video evidence from multiple angles of goals, fouls and offside decisions, monitored in a remote office in Stockley Park, meaning that referees can no longer make mistakes, and that the crowd has to wait for several minutes after a goal has been scored to see it they’re able to celebrate.

Back to the case for the defence. Let me tell you about how structure works for the old bloke in the corner holding his yellow and green scarf. I measure years not necessarily by calendar, but by season. That means I can not only look forward to the start of Summer, but the end as well. You measure the days by how long you have to the next game. In Covid times, the weeks, which seemed to be endlessly tedious, could be mapped out: Monday – press conference, Tuesday or Wednesday game, Thursday press conference, Saturday or Sunday game. Repeat until Matt Hancock gets caught. That sort of structure helped lots of people get through – it helped in Norwich that the team (and the press conferences) were managed by Daniel Farke, a man whose management capability and very presence made all genders swoon. And it helped that we were promoted, because DF got us playing the best style of football that people had seen in years. It was just a pity that everything, including the celebrations, got played out only to club staff and a few cameramen in masks.

Then the structure of a game itself. I live about a 40 minute walk from the ground, so I set off from the house at about 2, stop at the co-op to buy the multipack of snicker bars, meet my friend P at the bridge over the link road, walk to the ground, reviewing the team which came through on both of our phones just after 2, catch up on other stuff, get into the ground, stand up for the teams coming out, belt out a rousing version of Ón The Ball City, and settle down for the first half. Usually Norwich will be defending the goal in front of us, which I prefer, as a second half goal at the Barclay end is a very special thing indeed. First half over, a quick analysis of the game and the scoring of our own Canary Bingo, which is where we have to tick off the phrases used by the miserable bloke in seat 4 (‘Wake Up, Norwich!’; ‘Play it Forward for once in your life!’; ‘How many more times?!’) Then it’s time to scoff the chocolate before the second half, which can be joyous – Hernandez hurtling towards us with the whole stadium (including himself) speculating as to what he’s going to do next, or Josh Sargent rising majestically to head the ball, then falling to the floor clutching one of his two glass ankles, hobbling off and looking forward to some more quality time with the club physio, or Marcelino Nunez or Borja Sainz curling a beautiful ball into the net, running to the corner with a knee slide for the last ten yards and kissing the badge just as the knees get separated by the corner flag. Or it might be a bit more tense, with all the action at the other end as we get battered back – a tougher watch, but saved partially by a second round of Canary Bingo.

Before the end of the game, various people will leave. Sometimes this is tp get a bus, sometimes to ‘beat the traffic’ and sometimes because they can’t ‘bear to watch any more of this rubbish’. I’ve never understood this – to me it’s the same as leaving the cinema or the theatre early – even if you think you know what’s going to happen, you should always check, right? Anyway, full time, have a look to see if anything interesting is going on/off on the pitch, make our way down the stairs and along the road, reflecting as we go, possibly a swift beer on the way back (different pubs chosen for the season depending on whether we won, lost or drew).

And that’s the structure. I’m doing some reading at the moment on ordinariness and how it doesn’t have to equate to being boring – this is a really good example – it’s structured and not necessarily positive all the time, but I absolutely love every aspect of it.

But what about the tragedy and the elation? If you’re not a football supporter, then you might think that tragedy is a bit of a stretch for what, as Mrs E might remind me now and again, is just a game. But it’s not. For my team, it’s 27,000 people shouting at the tops of their voices when something happens that goes against what they consider to be the right way. It’s building up your hopes so much when our current manager talks about his plans for the club, to bring in young players, to play technically good football, to play possession football with aggression, only to find that your 35 year old central defender has gifted the ball to the opposition then comically fallen over his own feet when trying to get it back. It’s listening to the opposition fans taunt you when they’re 0:1 up, singing ‘Can we play you very week’ or ‘You must be useless, we’re winning away’. There’s even civic pride in there – our recent forays into the premier league will always be greeted by the pundits with phrases like ‘out of their depth’ or ‘little yoyo club’ or ‘certainty for relegation’, which, of course, normally comes true. So away from the city, meeting people from other places, they’ll equate Norwich with this sense of being second rate. And given that Norwich people often have a bit of an inferiority complex anyway, it really doesn’t help. 

But it’s mainly tragedy because that feeling of losing, or even not playing well, is in sharp relief to what it’s like when everything suddenly goes right. Of course, it doesn’t happen suddenly in reality. The flashes of brilliance that make the whole crowd go loopy are fashioned years ago in training, in the previous months as the manager builds up the chemistry of the team and drills the tactics in, in previous weeks as they form the team and the options for an individual game, in the lead up on the day, the injuries and substitutions that reshape the game itself, driven by the countless permutations of whether 22 players are performing, who can adapt best to those permutations, and occasionally a bit of luck or bad luck that pushes the tiniest of margins one way or another. To some extent, you get a bit of euphoria every week. Recently players like Emi Buendia, Gabriel Sara, Nunez and Sainz have made thousands of people just gasp and shout and wonder ‘how did he do that’. And when that happens, there’s no place I’d rather be. 

Which brings me to last Saturday, and perhaps a message to Mrs E about relative importance. We’re playing Coventry City, and we go 0-1 down in the first half, making the Snickers bars taste a little stale. We very rarely lose to Coventry, they’re below us (just) in the league, and they’re managed by Frank Lampard. Norwich people have long memories – some of them have never really forgiven the foreign suppression of the Kett Rebellion in 1549 so we can easily remember when FL took his Derby County team off in 2018 after a floodlight failure, cos he was 3-2 down, hoping to abandon the game, then came back and won 3-4. And then gloated. The second half begins with Norwich attacking, and just not being able to get the ball in the net. Our manager, Johann Hoff Thorup, a man with as much charisma and charm and swoon-worthy goodness as Daniel Farke before him, tries tactical changes, swapping Crnac for Hernandez, Shwartau for Dobbin, dropping the talismanic Kenny McLean to form a back three, and putting on Forson and Gordon – two young players who’ve not played this season – as a last gasp attempt to score. Still we can’t get past the Coventry defence, and with about 5 minutes to go,  as Forson and Gordon come on, the moaners start leaving the ground. I barely notice this but as we go into 5 minutes of injury time, something wonderful happens – Sainz makes another horizontal mazy run, and plays the ball back to Forson on the edge of the box. He swings his left foot, time seems to stand still, and then the ball dips perfectly into the top corner of the goal. The crowd go ballistic, and I’m turning round to see a row of empty seats where the moaners were before, which makes me even happier. The Coventry fans go very quiet. The Norwich fans are roaring – the place is absolutely buzzing, and in the 95th minute Hernandez chases a ball that most people would think would be lost, shoulders a defender, runs it into the penalty area and plays it back outside the box to Forson, who places it this time just inside the far post. What we need here now is a word more powerful than ballistic. 27,000 people, minus the Coventry fans, minus the people who left the theatre before the end of act two, go more than ballistic. At the far end of the pitch, Forson is being held up in the air like a small toddler by the mighty Shane Duffy. Some of the players end up in the stands. Thorup is dancing a strange Danish jig on the touchline. The final whistle goes. A hearty chorus of ‘One nil, and you fucked it up’ is directed to the dejected Coventry supporters. The players are still grabbing and hugging each other. It feels like we’ve just won the World Cup. 

There’s moments of elation in everyone’s life that are worth remembering, worth celebrating, worth experiencing. But there’s not that many that you get to enjoy, in the moment, with twenty thousand people in a relatively enclosed space. It’s beyond joyful. And that, Mrs E, is Why Football Is Important.