Perhaps I should have expected it, but I was taken aback by
the wave of negativity from keyboard warriors after the win at Leicester. Only one game, we only won because we were
up against ten men etc.
It seems that many fans enjoy their football most when the
club is failing. One fan characterised
it as a ‘moanfest’. But perhaps it isn’t
just a Charlton phenomenon? The
following extract is from today’s Sunday
Times article written by Martin Samuel. He
starts with booing at the Royal Opera House when the lead singer had to
withdraw during the performance because of illness.
‘There is anger surrounding almost every club this season,
but how many are in genuine crisis? Very few. There is an ocean of difference
between a club battling for existence, such as Sheffield Wednesday or
Morecambe, and one having a rotten season. Yet reactions are very similar: sack
the manager, sack the board, protest, boycott.
Fans stayed away from Blackburn Rovers’ match with Watford
last weekend, with the 11,640 crowd a 16.7 per cent fall on the season’s
average. Think that helped?
“League Two football with proper owners would be better than
this,” said Jamie Hoyles, of the Rovers Trust. Better than what? Blackburn
aren’t going out of business. They’re having a bad year. Last May, they were in
the play-off places with 30 minutes of the season to go, until conceding at
Sheffield United.
They sold players in
the summer and recruited unwisely on the cheap with the technical department in
disarray. Big mistakes were made. But to wish for League Two? Why
catastrophise?
Even trailing at half-time is now deemed unacceptable. The
boos drown any other noise. When did it come to this? ‘
I was reading an article recently about someone who had
emigrated to Western Australia (admittedly a great place) and said that one reason was that people in the
UK seemed so miserable and always looking for someone to blame. ‘Broken Britain’ doesn’t seem such a bad
place to live to me, although the constant rain recently is a drag.
