Posts tagged Foxes

Unusually for a self confessed geek, I am a football fan. I’m a season ticket holding Leicester City fan and have been now for about 5 years. Before then I was a Leicester “fan” but only really through my brothers and step-dad being season ticket holders and going to the odd testimonial game.

I don’t know what changed, but 5 years ago I went to a game at the Walkers Stadium and before I’d even sat down BANG a spectacular goal from Matty Fyatt 9 seconds in to the game. We went on to lose 2-1 to Preston but for some reason I decided to make more effort to go.

As you commit more time, hope, despair and money to following your team the better the goals feel and the lower the defeat take you. You dread the utter silent moment after you concede a goal and can only here the away fans revel. But the flip side is that half a second after the net bulges, you jump to your feet punching the air in unison with thousands that feel the exact same way at the exact same time, a moment you can strangely never remember. You regain your senses in a moment, applaud the goal scorer whilst telling all around you that the player you’ve been slagging of for the last 80 minutes is really the greatest player you’ve ever seen because he’s just scored in the last moments of a cold wet boring night out that cost £30.

As I got more in to it, the highs got higher and the lows got lower, way lower. Leicester got relegated, after 2 seasons of just surviving, to the 3rd division for the first time in it’s 125 year history. I decided to start following the foxes at the worst possible time, quite literally when the worst ever Leicester team existed.

But by this point I was addicted, I even had a few away games under my belt. Being an away fan is a strangle experience, for some reason it evokes the memories of 80′s style hooligans and riots. Having been to so many home games I knew football wasn’t like that any more, in fact it’s very very family friendly. That doesn’t stop you checking to make sure none of your replica kit is showing before you get out of the car in a strange city. You’re senses are heightened like your about to get jumped, but the fact is their fans are the exact same family friendly crowd you see at home games. You still hope to get to the sanctity of the away fans turnstile so you can get in and start shouting abuse at them at the top of your voice.

It sounds rosy, but being in the away end you are with a distilled set of people. Gone are most of the families and women leaving a concentration of young men who’ve probably been drinking for a fair while and those attitudes of the 80′s hooligans do start to come back through. Racist sentence fragments in the air build and eventually the chants start. Lot of people tut, those standing next to black or ethnic people cringe. But nothing is done as every one knows confrontation in this circumstance is just a ticket to trouble. Its just left their lingering. I wish I could do something about it, or even suggest a solution, but I honestly don’t know of one.

Back to the football, after seeing Leicester drop to an all time low. We had a new manager, Nigel Pearson. Quite a boring man to all outside observers but a man I’ve grown to admire. We started winning again, lots. We were running away with the league, but Nigel would always be dead pan in interviews, stating we take one game at a time and we end up where we end up. We were champions that year, and with the same philosophy we attacked this season and instead of the struggle everyone predicted, we remained near the top of the league all season and finished in the play-offs. Which ended in another roller-coaster night just last week where one moment we were on the verge of realising the dream of back to back promotions.

It wasn’t to be. We went out on penalties, gutted is the word I’ve heard use the most by fellow fans, but they really mean devastated.

This was followed by further bad news. It appears that before the all important play-off match there had been a training ground “bust-up”. Wayne Brown during a conversation apparently mentioned that he’d voted for racist right wing fascists the BNP. Now, I support freedom of speech and the right to vote for whoever you see fit, no matter how moronic you are. But telling your black and foreign team-mates is beyond stupid. What else should you expect from racists though?

But credit to Nigel Pearson and Leicester football club, they already stopped him from playing in the vital games and it looks like they are shipping him out to a lower league club. But again it’s left lingering. Racism still exists, and not just in the older generation, but it’s not as obvious as it once was.

I didn’t want this post to be so down, as I think people like the BNP and their supporters can be beat, the recent election results in Barking is a bright sign for the future. I hope we can kick one of their number from our council in our next local election.

As for the Foxes, we might of just missed out this season but I think we’re in great shape to have even better season next time around. Not that it matters, I’m going to there no matter what.

Ashley.

Picture credit: Daily Mail, Getty Images, EPLtalk.com, The Football League, The Leicester Mercury