I’ve never really understood the intense loyalty bordering on insanity which we see now associated with sports. I mean c’mon it’s just a game which you have no influence over in any way unless that is you decide to strip naked and run through the field, and even with that the most you can expect to achieve is to delay the next over by a 5 minutes which be spent be the ground security in trying to confiscate you from the pitch. I know numerous friends who support some football team in England or Europe and go to the trouble of staying up in the night till around 2 or 3 just to see a match that is going on in the Britain at afternoon. I have never felt any love for Wayne Rooney and neither has Ronaldhino ever silly football trick ever earned an ounce of respect from me that requires me to support their respective football team. Maybe it’s because I’m just not interested in sports in general. Many people who know my dad, my brother and me find that as a shock. It’s because all my dad did when he was a kid was play cricket. They tell me that he was real good and even made it to the tryouts for the Indian cricket team, where he was sadly not selected. That’s a good thing I tell him now, imagine the amount of pressure I would be under right now to play cricket, when I can’t even do something as bowl and the bat when in my hand for some reason repels the ball which then has a terrible affinity for the wicket. I can’t play cricket, not even if my life depended on it. It’s simply beyond my scope. Then again so was every other game and sports in general. I think there come a time in everyone’s time when one has to either choose the way of the book or the way of the cricket bat, and I for better or for worse have chosen the book.
Now I’d like to make one thing clear that this does not imply that I was the intellectually inclined kind. In no way ever did any of my angles incline towards that direction. I just simply liked to read, I need not have to learn something out of it reading it, I just had developed a kind of addiction for having my eyes focused on letters in a book. So it was never the playground for me. But it’s not like I never tried. Out of peer pressure actually, I’ve tried my hand at some games like badminton and basketball. In which I have gone the farthest among the lot in badminton, and over here by farthest I mean I’ve bought around 4 rackets and played one tournament match, which I lost for an obscene score. That was the end of my brief badminton career. It wasn’t worth my time to keep being humiliated like that; I would rather read a book. So now you say that I can’t criticize football fans when they go overboard with their emotions. Fine. But pray explain to me how breaking your backs in fights between club fans would in any way bring pride and glory or improvement in performance of your favorite team. Every time there are football league matches, we first see enthusiastic fans outside the stadium, and then we see drunk enthusiastic fans outside the stadium. And then we see drunk enthusiastic fans with missing teeth. It honestly gives me more entertainment seeing drunk fans brawling after a match than seeing the actual match itself. Maybe they should do everyone a favor and make a sport out of this dog match. First you have players of respective teams competing in the concerned game and then you have their respective fans knocking each other’s teeth out, the team with maximum number of teeth wins. At least then I’d get a sport to follow, I’d be grateful.
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