Who are "the fans"? None of us, all of us

Why I Wrote The Quiet Fan

As a book title, The Quiet Fan is meant to be more than slightly tongue in cheek. Sometimes I'm quiet when I watch a game (through shyness, fear, boredom or indifference), and sometimes I'm as noisy as hell (thrilled, annoyed, or I just feel like shouting out loud). I haven't written this book to point out the virtues of being quiet. In fact, it's the opposite. The quiet fan is the unrepresented fan - and that's pretty much all of us. I've had it with the idle pigeonholing of fans as violent morons (70s/80s), or dupes willing to do anything and buy anything for the sake of their team (90s and beyond).

"A Fan's Life."
One fan's life.

Fever Pitch was a good enough work, but it was only one fan's experience. One of the book's consequences (not Nick Hornby's fault) was the media's abandonment of its previous fan stereotype, the drunken hooligan (see Hillsborough and everything that came before). In itself, this wasn't a bad thing. It was published shortly after Paul Gascoigne's tears at Italia 90, and an emerging fan culture that had actually started to enjoy being in the stadium. The downside was that the apparent hooligan was replaced by the apparent fanatic - the obsessive, the so-called real fan. The only true and proper fans were season ticket holders who cared about their team to the exclusion of all else in life. This fan lived for something now called 'footie' and had no family (or at least none they paid attention to), and no life to speak of outside of the game. Emotionally inadequate misfits to be pitied and patronised, yet moulded and manipulated into becoming the Sky era's "passionate" customer core.

I dislike being told when I have to be passionate, or that I have to be passionate at all. I dislike being told that I would do anything for my team. No I wouldn't, and neither would most of the fans I've ever met. We don't always get angry when our

Disturbing Fans No. 3: The Rabid Lincoln Skinhead

In early 1980s England, skinheads often meant bad news. Not that I want to generalize, but if you bumped into (or even looked at) a shaven-headed Herbert wearing combat gear and Dr. Martens boots half way up his shins, there was a good chance you’d either be on the end of a violent attack, or some unsophisticated views about racial integration in Thatcher’s Britain. And then a violent attack. 

So, lads, what did you make of the first half?

While a number of skinheads were left-leaning followers of the punk and Ska-revival scenes, there was also a significant sub-culture of violent neo-fascists. There were one or two opposition cells like Red Action who actively took the fight back out to the Nazi-loving skins. Good for them, but I have to confess I wasn't part of that. Any group accepting me as a member would have been called something like Pale Tortoise, and we'd have quaked under a solid, hard shell until all the action - red or otherwise - had moved on.

One evening at Sincil Bank in 1982, though, I did get to observe the Rabid Lincoln Skinhead. City were playing Sheffield United, whose huge travelling support had taken up the entire side terrace, meaning that the home fans were squeezed in at the Railway End behind the goal. I was on my own, standing beside two blokes who were suddenly approached by ‘Danny’, a skinhead of their acquaintance.

"I scored for Milan!" The Primo Levi short story that foresaw Virtual Reality

Virtual reality headsets are nothing new, at least not in the human imagination. Back in the 1960s, Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi - one of the 20th century's most important writers - published 'Retirement Package,' a short story that foresaw the use of a helmet connected to a machine called a Total Recorder (or Torec). This allowed humans to live inside any pre-recorded event and experience the sensation of, say, scoring a goal for AC Milan.

"Yay! I scored for AC Milan!"

The narrator is being shown the Torec and its tapes by a friend, Simpson, who has just received the machine as a 'retirement gift' from his company, NATCA, where he's been a long-serving salesman. The Torec is not yet on the market and Simpson is just the company's willing guinea pig, but using his sales skills he persuades the sceptical narrator, who is not a football fan, to put on the helmet and place himself in the shoes of a Milan player called Rasmussen.

The narrator complies and describes "an intense odour of overturned earth. I was sweating and my ankle hurt slightly." He also feels "nimble and ready, like a loaded spring". Running with the ball, he passes to a team-mate on his right and, amid "the rising roar of the

Letting go of Leeds - seven years in the League Cup hinterland

Lincoln City returned to the Football League last Saturday, and tonight (Tuesday) they return to the League Cup. It's almost seven years to the day since their last appearance in this competition, a night I remember well because I flew in specially from Germany to watch it. We were away to cuddly Leeds United, a team supported by several members of my extended family. We'd decided to all go and watch the match together. A night of Family Fun.

Finally time for the Leeds v
 Lincoln Family Championship

Leeds are the sort of club you're supposed to hate, but hate's an over-used and extremely unhelpful word when it comes to football. I once wrote a contribution to a regular When Saturday Comes feature called Viva Hate about my feelings towards Walsall FC, because one of their players had attacked me outside a night club in Birmingham. But it was a disingenuous piece of writing. The incident had been funny and farcical, not traumatic, and it didn't really make me hate Walsall. How can you hate Walsall? It's like trying to hate a cardboard box.

If life's too short to hate Walsall, then it's also too short to hate Leeds. Especially when it's you and your dad (Lincoln) outnumbered by nine other sisters, aunts, cousins and nephews (Leeds). And especially when you're the only Lincoln fans in the home stand. You're not going to stand up and start shouting, "You've been dirty bastards since the