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No one loved a really good party more than yours truly, and I mean “loved”. Seriously, it’s been a good 25 years since my last really good party.
I mentioned this to a mate recently, how much I missed dropping the Stones on the turntable after midnight and whipping the dacks off for my jumping jack flasher routine in front of hundreds of astonished onlookers.
I used to love that, I really did. These days Mick and Keef and I are lucky to perform to more than a dozen people.
Where, I asked my mate, had all the really good parties gone?
What is wrong with people these days that they can’t get off on Keef’s crossfire hurricane riff and my pink take on Mick’s chicken strut?
He had a laugh at that.
“Dugald,” he said in his gentlest assassin’s voice, “People still get off on the Stones. They just don’t get off on you being obnoxious. The really good parties these days are the ones you’re not at.”
He threw a rolled-up newspaper at my head and added to the hurt. “Check the sports pages. You’re a big story in the football section.”
What did Torres missing from point blank have to do with me? I ain’t never got around a keeper, not once.
He pointed, which was also rude: “Turkish Terraces No-Man’s Land”.
To paraphrase, the Turkish Football Federation decided that teams being punished for unruly crowd behaviour would no longer have to play behind closed doors.
To bring back the “the joy back to football” and avoid “silent” games, attendances would be restricted to females and boys under 12.
Fenerbahçe’s match against Manisaspor was the first cab off the rank. A few mothers, daughters, babies and boys under 12 turned up too – around 41,000 of them.
Apparently both teams were cheered onto the pitch. Players threw flowers into the crowd.
“It was such a fun and pleasant atmosphere,” Manisaspor’s Omer Aysan said.
Alex de Sousa, the Canaries’ captain, declared the memory would stay with him forever.
It will stay with plenty of others too. It’s the empirical evidence football administrators have been chasing for about a hundred years.
Is the acne and alcohol-fuelled terrace pig the big positive for football he thinks he is? Does the atmosphere at football matches really depend on him?
Is the bloke who carries on like an ugly pork chop while blaming the league, club administrators or other sports for lousy attendances at their football matches – everyone and everything but that which falls under his control – an asset to the game at all?
Would there really be no show without Punchy? Or is he just someone living in the past off some self-promulgated myths; just some twit running around with his dacks off trying to draw attention to himself?
Would football miss for even a second his traditional-football-culture-endorsed nasties, dogmatism, obscenities and bastardisation of the so-called flogs and bandwagoners who threaten to undermine his self-appointed status as football’s lifeblood?
What impact do supporter groups’ bully boys, hardcore tribalist and self-appointed arbiters of terrace culture really have on the overall attendance equation?
The experiment being played out in Turkey right now is the hardcore thickhead know-all football exclusivist’s worst nightmare.
It threatens to change the entire narrative around football attendances. Where were these people before and why had they stayed away?
If football didn’t have such a demonstrably broad appeal, the terrace chauvinist mightn’t ever have to acknowledge that in this day and age he’s probably just a carbuncle on football’s backside, and the reason the broader audiences don’t attend.
All these decades he’s gotten by on a pretty safe bet, that his football club wouldn’t have the gumption to take a hardline on anti-social behaviour and escort the foul-mouthed minority of terrace pigs to the exits and return ownership of the game back to the civilised majority of supporters.
Upon his return, now he knows he’s not half as important to the club as he thought he was a couple of weeks back, will the Fenerbahce hot-head moderate his behaviour?
Maybe, maybe not; the terrace pig’s other speciality is his steadfast failure to understand basic physics and chemistry. Historically the notion of inclusiveness and the compromises in his behaviour and expression that might entail have escaped him.
He’s slow on the uptake, your aggro macho terrace man, but even to him the message ought to be clear by now.
Like me and the Stones and the chicken-skin dance, he’s not funny any more.
The really good parties are where he ain’t.
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