The Spectator Has Somewhere Else To Be

If there’s one thing The Spectator can’t understand it’s the compulsion some people feel to leave football matches early. (In actual fact there is not just one thing that The Spectator can’t understand, but several, including: FAI club licensing, Serbo-Croat, this economic crisis thingy, Twitter, quantum physics, Jamie Redknapp’s unfeasibly tight trousers on Sky Sports, alcohol free beer and Cork City’s finances. But the most baffling is this desire to pay good money into a match and then bugger off home early.) Internationals, cup finals, local derbies, nerve-shredding relegation battles or classic total football masterclasses- no match can be completed without part of the crowd heading for the exit signs with five minutes to go.
Why? There seems to be two reasons. Reason number one is to “beat the traffic”. Now really, after travelling to a match why would you disregard the final five minutes in order to get home and get the kettle on ten minutes earlier? Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium is particularly notorious, with banks of empty seats by full time at every game. After paying £100 for a ticket, is it really worth leaving before the end to save yourself five minutes queue at the tube station, or even half an hour?
Reason number two is slightly more understandable. Reason number two for leaving early is to avoid witnessing a hammering. The Spectator has heard tales of Liverpool fans who, after trekking across the width of Europe, left the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul at half-time with Liverpool 3-0 down to Milan. Numerous Dundalk fans left the away match at Bohs in Dalymount before the final whistle. Now admittedly the chance of De Town turning around a 4 goal deficit with 9 men was slim, but The Spectator and many like him could not countenance leaving early. Leaving early means giving up on your team and showing the opposition that you’re only there when things are going well. Leaving early means you might miss something unmissable. Leaving early also denies you the opportunity to express your appreciation or disgust of your team, your distaste for the opposition or your contempt for the referee. (We’re talking purely hypothetically here of course. No Dundalk fan would take issue with the theatrics of Bohemians or the performance of referee par excellence Anthony Buttimer, of course.)
The Spectator must own up to one act of early leaving. It was back in the day when moonlighting as a Reading fan – this was Elm Park in the mid-90s I hasten to add, long before the Premiership or any shiny new out-of-town stadium. After 85 minutes of another dismal relegation-threatened performance, against Norwich, I decided at 2-0 down I’d had enough and started wandering back in to town. A couple of minutes from the ground I heard a cheer- 2-1 or 3-0? Still I’d gone too far at this stage and the game was in stoppage time... two minutes later I heard another cheer! Could it be 2-2? Could it be that I missed such a dramatic comeback? I cursed myself for leaving early and hastened my walk. I was back in the town centre in time to watch the results come in on the BBC vidiprinter (no Soccer Saturday in them days!), and sure enough I had missed two crucial goals…. Reading 0 Norwich City 4. But that’s beside the point, I could have missed two Reading goals, a dramatic comeback, an audacious Lee Nogan bicycle kick or the bewigged Bulgarian goalkeeper Bobby Mihailov storming forward to score from a corner. I didn’t... but I might have. After that I vowed never to leave a game early again.
The Spectator wonders how these early leavers, with such important things to be getting on with, deal with the rest of life. In the theatre do they wait until the final act, then gather themselves and hurry out to avoid the rush? In the cinema do they check the running time of their chosen movie so they can leave five minutes early, getting to the bathroom before a queue has formed? More pertinently, how do these people handle the unspeakable act of the horizontal hokey-cokey? It’s not a pleasant thought, is it? But anyway, you didn’t read it here first, cos I’m sure you had much more important things to do than read The Spectator article all the way to the last paragraph.