Why I don't like Derby Day

Lincoln City and Grimsby Town will contest a Lincolnshire derby at Blundell Park in the Football League tomorrow afternoon. The word 'derby' is supposed to trigger something bigger in the football fan's emotional spectrum. There are extra match-day abstractions heaped on to all the usual clichés about just how important these three points are. 'Rivalry', 'bragging rights' and even 'hatred' are thrown in to the conversational build-up, as sure as turkeys will have their throats coldly slit sometime in the early weeks of December.

Derby day - time to unearth
your statutory hatred

I can't help but feel we're being sold an artificial product when derby time rolls around. Of course the clubs hype it up to sell tickets, the media churn out hackneyed headlines to lure in more readers, and the League itself wouldn't dream of interfering to brake the Derby Day Express, because marketing and publicity are far more important nowadays than, say, the possibility of a clean, open game of football.

Yet cranking up the pre-derby rhetoric does the fixture no favours. All that furious noise puts sporting pressure on the teams, and the games will often be scrappy, hurried encounters. Players new to the area will be told "how much this game means" to the locals. They may convince themselves of the match's super-added importance in the interests of self-motivation. And then the two sides tear into each other and it's beyond anyone to even control the bloody ball.

As a Lincoln City fan, I have to confess that I don't hate Grimsby Town. I don't even dislike them. I grew up almost exactly half way

My night as a corporate fan - a stunning exposé of free beer and shady deals

I have never been a corporate fan, but in the interests of balanced reporting I generously accepted an offer to accompany a friend who is. His firm holds six VIP tickets for every FC Cologne home game, and last night they played my local team, Eintracht Frankfurt. It's the kind of gritty, undercover work that we football bloggers are occasionally forced into when exploring the seedy under-belly of sport's darker side. My only problem would be resisting the lucrative job offers that would no doubt come my way via a shady half-time handshake. I was determined not to become 'one of us'.

Far from the 'wild horde' at
FC Köln's Müngersdorfer Stadium

First, let me tell you about my friend, 'John' (his real name). We met when we were both proper journalists several years ago before our profession died and he crossed to a more generous paymaster to work in something called 'communications' (and I crossed into a cash-free zone called 'freelancing'). His job, however, is not to communicate, but to obfuscate. That's why his firm's web site proclaims that it "provides solutions to propel our customers from start to finish to unlock new insights". Understand?

John has three colleagues along on the corporate tab who are all FC Cologne fans. John himself claims to be a Bayern Munich supporter for some tenuous reason I can't recall, although he's from Chicago and lives near Frankfurt. Let's just

"Watch the news!" When rogue players express interesting views

Reading interviews with active footballers is like beach-combing with a blindfold on. The chances of stumbling on something worthwhile among the miles of sand and seaweed are as high as a player saying something interesting under the watchful auspices of their agents and club press officers. Very occasionally, though, you might come across a pearl, or at least a nice colourful cowrie.

"If someone says football's the
 only thing in my life, I
think that's stupid."

It's especially pleasing to hear from players who can look beyond the game. In the latest issue of German monthly 11 Freunde, the Hoffenheim striker Sandro Wagner talks about football's place in society. Wagner, who made his German international debut this past summer at the age of 29, is a feisty, physical player who, to say the least, has made himself unpopular down the years with opposing fans thanks to his robust style. He fouls a lot, and he gets fouled a lot.

I like him, though. Last season when he played for Hoffenheim at Eintracht Frankfurt he took a nasty, deliberate elbow to the face from Frankfurt's captain David Abraham, which went unseen and unpunished by the referees. Wagner got up, played on, and after the game made no fuss about it at all. In the 11 Freunde interview he says that Abraham apologised for the incident even as the game was still being played, and for him that was the end of the matter.

What I really like in the interview, though, is when he answers the question, "Do fans take football too seriously?" Wagner replies, "I see it like a lot of fans do - I love football, it's the greatest sport in the world. But many go over the top. If someone says to me, football's the only thing in my life, then I think that's stupid. To someone like that I