A thing about my first ever football game

I went to my first ever football game today – Chelsea vs Spurs. I wasn’t sure what to wear, so took two layers of fur just in case. ‘There were some stabbings at last week’s Spurs game against West Ham,’ announced my friend Sarah – a Chelsea fan – on the tube to the stadium.

Happily, no stabbings today. No one scored either, but I had a belter of a time. Slightly by accident, all four of us – three Chelsea fans and me – ended up in seats among the diehard Spurs supporters. ‘Sophia, you mustn’t open your mouth,’ warned Sarah. So I bought a hat and a scarf to disguise myself. There was a nervous moment when Sarah’s fiancee Hugo, who was already letting the side down by wearing a Barbour, forgot himself entirely and shouted ‘Come on Chelsea’, but – by and large – I think we got away with it.

I particularly liked the bespectacled, balding man sitting behind me who seemed to think he could do better than the Premiership footballers scurrying about on the pitch. ‘STOP BEING SO LAZY YOU IDLE CUNTS,’ he shouted maybe 40 or 50 times. I also loved the man in front of us who didn’t much like the referee either. ‘OI REF, ARE YOU FUCKING BLIND?’ he said at several junctures. And I very much enjoyed the sophisticated songs roled out pretty constantly by Chelsea fans – ‘YOU’RE ALL WANKERS, YOU’RE ALL WANKERS’ they bellowed at the Spurs seats. What larks.

I don’t like beer but I had a cider at the interval, which is apparently called ‘half-time’ when it comes to football games. But I only drank half of it because the security man said I wasn’t allowed to take my drink back to my seat in the stadium in case I bottled someone. I told him that literally never happened during lacrosse games at school, but he remained unmoved.

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