I Will Follow: The Travels and Travails of Being a Villa Fan

I Will Follow - The Travels and Travails of Being an Aston Villa fan

I’ve missed a lot of Aston Villa games in my life; almost all of them in fact. You could say that my regular non-attendance at Villa Park has caused the club to become a shadow of its former self, or you could argue the opposite: without my being on the steps of the Holte End, we’ve reached semi-finals, finals, seen of relegation and made it into Europe. My attendance record from the club’s formation to the present day has made not one iota of difference to the fortunes of Aston Villa.

However, I’m always there in spirit. There have been many reasons for the relative paucity of my appearances at Villa Park and on the road, be they financial, work-related or for personal reasons, but I have always ensured my attention is firmly on claret and blue goings-on. But the reason for these metaphysical meanderings is not to get into a debate over what constitutes a fan: as far as I’m concerned, if you care, you’re a fan. In 1995, I didn’t even have a paper round to earn enough to get into a single game, let alone a season ticket, but I still cried like an idiot because I thought we were about to be relegated after a late loss to Leeds United.

No, this piece concerns the lengths I go to just to keep in touch with what’s happening whenever the Villa take to the pitch. We all have our favourite stories of over-zealous fandom, but it wasn’t until I started to consider just how insane my actions are to the outside observer that I wondered if I shouldn’t try and occupy my Saturday afternoons in a different way.

The action that inspired these thoughts were the minutes leading up to the Sunderland game last month. A few weeks before, my girlfriend and I had organised a trip to Central Europe following a long period of stressful work for both of us. After some tinkering with flights, we decided it would be more cost-effective to return on a Monday afternoon, when my other half reminded me we would be travelling back on the day of the game.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘There’ll be plenty of time.’

Cut to Saturday evening in Prague, and just when I should have been considering which kind of lager I wanted to have, I bought up the football scores and saw that Wigan had drawn with Tottenham. From that moment on the Sunderland game was never far from my thoughts, despite Prague’s beauty and a pleasant denouement in Berlin. Instead of the Brandenburg Gate, I had thoughts of a different but no less celebrated structure slap bang in the middle of Witton.

We travelled by train back home, passing Villa Park just before kick-off. We had our suitcases with us, and we both privately admitted afterwards we’d considered suggesting alighting at the ground, asking the chaps at the turnstiles to safeguard our souvenirs and dirty clothing, while we took in the game. I think part of me and my better half is still annoyed neither of us spoke up.

But had I still been travelling, Monday evening would have been taken up by the game. It’s just how the fan mentality works. We will ruin any occasion with our need to be in touch with events. My recently-retired father has become obsessed with the news, to the extent he will watch the six o’clock and ten o’clock bulletin on the off-chance something has happened. Now he knows how I feel about Aston Villa.

Many’s the holiday in my youth when I sat on cliff-tops listening to a scratchy signal of Radio Five, too tense to eat, while Darius Vassell went through the motions of missing an easy one-on-one. One more than one occasion, I’ve disrupted my mother’s careful soap opera recording schedule so I could tape the entire coverage of a home game against Middlesbrough.

This childish obsessiveness hasn’t waned, sadly. In fact, I would say in the last few years it’s got worse, because I’ve been employed in various guises to write about football, and usually uniquely about Aston Villa. This has meant the infinite patience shown by my family for so many years has been transferred to my girlfriend. We’ve had to plan outings for weekends of Sky games, because most Saturdays were out of the question. The weekend of the Anfield win this season, we were in Bournemouth and had a lovely time, aside from the ninety or so minutes I was mentally unobtainable, lost in a world of 140 character updates.

Surprisingly, nobody has yet chinned me or binned me, so I recognise I’m a lucky man to have this kind of tolerant network. But while I recognise I’m on thin ice much of the time, I can’t help myself. Notable takes of the piss over the years include wearing a radio earpiece while attending a ballet recital by a family friend to follow a 1-0 win over Stoke; using up somebody’s phone credit to receive updates of a loss to Rapid Vienna; missing a friend’s birthday night out because of a League Cup game against West Ham that needed to be replayed and causing a big Boxing Day headache by declining a lunch date so I could see us get spanked by Spurs. For all of those incidents and more, I’m unreservedly sorry.

Psychologists might suggest I’ve got some sort of OCD, or issues with control or perfection. I would say there are people worse than I, and this article barely scratches the surface. If you ever meet somebody who was convinced their fading green pants earned their team a victory, you’ve met somebody like me. If you’ve ever posed a me-versus-your-team ultimatum to somebody and been mortified by the answer, you’ve met somebody like me. And if you’ve ever been somewhere that’s only been open to civilisation for a couple of years, and spotted someone with a backpack wandering round in obscure away shirt from the mid-90s, you’re seeing me. There are people like me everywhere: the obsessives, the silent support, the wandering worriers. Pity us, for we know what we do - we’re just not entirely sure why.

Chris Stanley