Me and football broke up… is it time we got back together?

When they cry, I cry.

England team, last 16 World Cup 1998 versus Argentina. My dad stormed out into the garden to also cry although he has denied this ever since.

West Ham team 2003, drawing away at Birmingham City, relegated after a decade of top-flight football.

FA Cup final West Ham against Liverpool, 2006 Millennium Stadium whilst Wembley was being re-built – death by penalties 3-1.

England team World Cup 2006, too young for the pubs and it was just as well.

West Ham team relegated again 2011 (thanks, Wigan).

England team Euros 2020.

When they cry, I cry. And it’s always been like this.

I want to say I looked up all those stats and years, but I didn’t. I just know them, like tattoos on my own skin. I remember my first game at Upton Park, it was September 20th 2000 against Bradford City and the thought of the noise, and the crowds, and the singing, gives me sand in my eyes to this day. I was 9. My mum was two days off 40. It was, up until fairly recently, one of the best days of my life.

All of my youth was spent very much like that. My dad, a semi-professional footballer-turned-amputee, the son of a West Ham reserve who resigned from the team with a postcard from his National Service abroad, turned away from all religions except the Good Shepherd Chris Kamara on Saturday afternoons. Andy Gray and Sky Sports News was the king of our house. I wore the I COME FROM AN EAST END FAMILY badge like a medal of honour in a primary school full of boys with Chelsea and Manchester Utd lunchboxes. Blackburn Rovers beat West Ham 7-1 in October 2001 and it was a genuinely awful Monday. I don’t have to look it up to check that that’s correct. It was twenty years ago. But I remember.

If anyone asks me about my first heartbreak, it certainly wasn’t over a boy. It was the FA Cup final between West Ham and Liverpool, when me and a few of ‘the lads’ (naturally, I was friends with a vast group of lads, wore my West Ham shirt to school on non-uniform days and we used to watch football together all the time) met up at one of their houses to watch the game, as we were all too young for the pubs. Me and Tom sat at the bottom of his stairs until 6 o clock that evening, crying our little adolescent eyes out. Heartbreak.

I was already hot-headed, angry and well on my way to becoming a menace to society by the time England were booted out of the 2006 World Cup with one of the most abysmal referring decisions we’d seen in a while. Of course, being a West Ham fan, I was quite used to that. Terms like ‘magic sponge’ and ‘Fergie time’ were thrown around in jest so, so often, but for my hormonally outraged teenage (alright, and well into adulthood as well) self, it felt like something to go to war over. It was all just so unfair, every week, every time. Nick Hornby wrote in his football-themed book Fever Pitch that he couldn’t believe how much the supporters around him seemed to hate, absolutely hate being there, but showed up every week. It’s a mystery. And it’s true. I was, however, present at Upton Park for Ronaldo missing a penalty in December 2007. There’s a video on YouTube. Not to sound vindictive, but it really is the best.

I learned quickly at university that a woman who speaks about football is not welcome company. Other girls said things like, “Oh, boys must love you, because you love football as much as they do,” and generally the boys in question talked over me, corrected me (I was right, though) and in the case of my boyfriend at the time, went as far as to physically restrain me when I tried to join in an ill-informed conversation that was happening near me about football, with a ‘Don’t, no one cares,’ to put me in my place.

I trained in sports journalism after my English degree. It was wonderful to not be the only woman in the room for a change, but it still didn’t help. My exam result was mixed up with someone else’s, so whilst I failed for my ‘poor, non-native English’ and was forced to re-sit (even though the examining body acknowledged that they had made a mistake), missing out on the window for all the journalism graduate jobs, the actual recipient of that low grade and comment went on to be a correspondent for CNN and I had to go back to my former job at Konica Minolta, administrating the delivery of photocopiers.

I worked at [a national newspaper with a thriving sport section who shall remain nameless so I don’t get sniped in my sleep] for a bit. On my first day on the sport desk, I was asked if I was lost and needed directions to Celebrity. I was one of two women there and a passing male colleague referred to us as ‘half of Little Mix.’ I covered a press conference at Fulham’s Craven Cottage, ahead of their fixture against Manchester City. I shorthanded the interviews with René Meulensteen and wrote up the piece back at the office. Then I was involved in a conversation that went like this:

Man #1: Who’s the manager of Man City?

Me: René Meulensteen.

Man #1: No, no, the manager.

Me: René Meulensteen. I was there yesterday.

Man #1: No I mean, the team manager -

Man #2: René Meulensteen.

Man: Ah, that’s it. Thanks.

I then had to endure the pair of them trying to work out how to spell it. My coverage of the press conference was published, but under someone else’s name.

So, what can I say? I got fed up. I felt utterly unwelcome in the world of football especially, and sport in general. Without a famous dad or a famous husband to prop me up in the industry that seems to require one or the other (or preferably both), I watched games less and less. I went to Upton Park less and less. I campaigned vigorously against the selling of Upton Park and the move to the Olympic Stadium which I knew was a hopeless cause, and it was. As we’ve seen over the last few days with cancer patients stuck in hospital with no visitors ‘because Covid’ but Wembley all but full to the rafters with bare-chested drunken maniacs making basically physical love to each other at every completed pass, money wins. I vowed to never, ever go there – and I haven’t.

I have a tattoo of the Hammers on my ankle that I got when I was 20. At the time, I was dead proud of it and showed everyone. The last few years I’ve been hiding it, and actively pursued methods of removal. Someone saw it once and asked if it was the Communist party symbol, and I said yes. I felt more connected to extreme socialist ideals than a team of millionaire pretty boys who roll over clutching their perfectly fine shin every weekend , surrounded by corporate wankers on a corporate day out who don’t even know who Ron Greenwood was and why he mattered - and making a sham of something I used to love.

When my journalism career collapsed and I experienced a similar level of ‘oh, you must be someone’s girlfriend / wife, otherwise why would you be here?’ nonsense at even British amateur American football level, I gave up completely. I resigned myself to the fact that no one cares what I think, what I know and what I remember. As an actual freelance journalist for an international news organisation for which I was paid £150 a day for my service, I had to stand by while someone (older, male) interviewed actual West Ham players and quoted incorrect stats and info at them, while I stood silently and watched because I was thetrainee. It was unbearable, and so I stopped.

Since then (that was 7 years ago now) I treat hearing about sport like I’m being forced to attend an ex’s wedding. I know something dark and horrid that they don’t know and they’re all celebrating and talking about it, and I don’t want to celebrate and talk about it because it hurts. But also it’s about 90% of how I was raised and it hurts just the same to not be involved anymore, even though it brought me nothing but pain and emotional penury.

I didn’t watch any of the Euros until the second half of England v Germany because I told myself I didn’t care. I was happy enough enjoying my life watching stuff I’ve seen before on Netflix because plenty of people aren’t into football and they’re not missing anything, and neither am I. I don’t watch Love Island, I don’t watch the Jungle (or the Castle, whatever), I don’t really care for watching celebrities do things. I didn’t watch Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad. I own exactly zero music from the last five years. I like the past, thank you. It’s fine.

Then they cried, and I cried. And I realised I do still care. Declan Rice plays for West Ham and that’s why I recognise him, even though I haven’t watched West Ham play for years – somehow, I still know who he is and why he matters. Like everything else in my life with football, as it always was, I don’t have to check. I just know.

They cry, I cry. I guess me and football are becoming friends again. Pain? Oh yes. Emotional penury? Without a doubt. Coming home, World Cup 2022?

Well – why on earth not?