Friendly Fire

I know a lot of people who are adamant in their support of their football club, but who have never been to a pre-season friendly. This is by no means a bad thing, in effect, I suppose it is simply the same as avoiding trailers to retain the element of surprise when watching a film. And to be honest in the same way a snippet of a nonsensical action sequence doesn’t quite match up to the whole story, watching your team play in un-numbered shirts, their shouts echoing across empty seats can dampen the enigma thrown at you via the flash graphics of satellite television.
However, for all the unfamiliarity in atmosphere, I maintain that these people are missing out on some of the glorious oddities of football. For starters there is the fixtures themselves.

Middlesborough versus Norton and Stockton Ancients, Queens Park Rangers versus China, or Doncaster Rovers versus Real Sociedad is the footballing equivalent of a burning camper van on the hard shoulder, you know you shouldn’t be intrigued, but you just can’t help but slow down and have a good old nosey.

This heady mix can get to even the most subdued of football fans. I know this first hand because my one and only pitch invasion came at a pre-season friendly. In the abridged version of a long story it came about due to one too many seafront beers and ended with a friend of mine rugby tackling a ballboy on the halfway line of Scarborough’s McCain Stadium in order to retrieve my beachball.

Lackadaisical stewarding played a significant part in this discretion (they’d all gone off duty for a half-time cuppa) and such relaxed organisation is another pre-season speciality. Two summers ago I was at Meadow Lane the PA system relentlessly played the opening of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ for ten minutes despite a scratched CD meaning the chorus never once came into sight. It took the booming voice of a Yorkshireman in the away end yelling “Its stuck!” to prompt a member of Notts County staff to investigate.

Such is the overhyped media savvy world of domestic football in the UK that what was once a game has now become an experience. As such, its planned with slick precision that does not allow for an on pitch pursuit of an inflatable nor a faulty CD player. Pre-season friendlies may not have the noise and excitement of competitive matches, but for me at least its a much closer experience of the real world of football.