More Football — Luke [tiny]

More Football

So yesterday's post wasn't what I'd intended to write but serves well as a basis for understanding this post. So my son is football mad and great at football. I know nothing about football. Where do I start with him? First thing to know is football match tickets can be expensive. Silly expensive. About 6 years ago I took him along to Brighton & Hove Albion to watch his first match. We went with my mate Steve, my son's godfather, who happens to love football and play a lot himself. It was a dire match that Brighton lost 0-1. It was cold and raining. If anything I hoped the experience would put my boy off football for life. As we left the ground after the final whistle he turned round and said “that was great!”. Ah oh! So to make life cheaper (paying £40 a pop to entertain a 5 year old for an afternoon wasn't a long term option) I asked about and found out about Whitehawk FC.

(A bit of scene setting: We live in Hove. Hove is nice. It's genteel and middle class and full of yoga instructors. The local corner shop to me sells 3 types of non-dairy milk alternatives and chia seeds. You get the picture? Whitehawk is the other side of town and has the reputation of being the rough part of town. When we first moved down 20 years ago I heard the reputation of Whitehawk and went for a stroll about one day as I love walking around a new area to get to know it. Where I grew up in south London at the time had the highest rates of street robbery in the country and was the epicentre of the London crack trade. Whitehawk in comparison seemed like quite a nice suburb to me so I guess it is all relative though I do understand kids growing up there probably aren't afforded all the opportunities that kids growing up elsewhere in the city might have.)

Whitehawk had always been a small non-league team in the shadow of the Brighton & Hove Albion and had had tiny crowds. In fact [the “Wealdstone Raider” video that went viral])https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealdstone_Raider) about 7 years ago was filmed there. It's a drunk opposition supporter taking the mickey out of Whitehawk saying “you've got no fans” and being aggressive. However some (alledgedly rather dodgy) local businessmen had been pumping into the club and they had had 3 successive promotions in a row to get the National League South. That's the 6th tier of English football and sniffing at professional full-time footballers and real chances of joining the “proper” football league. All of which meant they had a bit of a buzz about them when someone mentioned them to us. One Saturday afternoon I take my son and a couple of his friends along (as kids under 16 were free with a paying adult with my ticket being £12!). Their ground is a bit ramshackle and looked like it was last renovated in the early 90s. Unlike league football you can drink alcohol in sight of the pitch and you aren't allocated seats. In fact the opposite as fans tend to congregate behind the other side's goal which means both sets of fans swap ends at half time. However what struck me the most were the fans there. Forming a large, noisy, cheerful bunch they sung good humoured songs the whole match long. Songs against homophobia and sexism. Funny songs celebrating the players and songs about themselves. And they drank a lot! Here's a recent video all about the Whitehawk fans so you can get the idea. Basically I loved the atmosphere and we became regulars at Whitehawk. (Not diehards but usually a match a month.) My son loved it as he got a lot of freedom there and who doesn't love singing and shouting out loud? Actually I think part of why it is so fun is when else do you get the chance to make so much noise for so long? There's something good for your soul in letting out all that energy in such a positive and noisy way.

We were also still occasionally going to BHAFC matches as my son was mad for them too so this was all costing me quite a bit! Then in the run up to my son's birthday the club were promoting half season tickets so I got us some primarily just to save money. My son loved the football, I loved having a pie and pint at halftime! At the end of the second season of having season tickets the Albion got promoted to the Premier League. The buzz and celebrations basically cemented me as a football fan and the friends that previously never broached the subject of football with me now started regularly talking to me about it.

We still go along to Whitehawk matches but much less frequently now. Still have the Albion season tickets too but my son (when we're not on lockdown!) trains 3 nights a week with his team and has matches on a Sunday. That's 9 hours a week of football alone plus the time spent watching professional football. It really had become a huge part of my life and I am missing it.

This is one of my 100 Days to Offload posts. It is a blogging challenge started by Kev Quirk. Check https://100daystooffload.com and go score the goal of making your own blog.