Who Are Ya?: 92 Football Clubs – and Why You Shouldn’t Support Them by Kevin Day (Bloomsbury Sport 2020)

 

Chelsea

A friend of mine once became convinced his dad was having an affair after many happy years of marriage. There was no logic to this. His dad just wasn’t the type, for a start, and he was never an energetic man, but there was no shaking my mate and he went full on, with private detectives, the lot. His dad wasn’t having an affair but did see a psychiatrist because of an increasing paranoia that he was being followed.

I now know how my mate felt, because I’m beginning to suspect that my dad may, for years, have been a secret Chelsea fan. As you’ll discover, I don’t support Palace because of him, he supports them because of me. Actually, when I was a very young kid he was never that interested in football, although he quite liked QPR (which is still a fairly accurate description of a lot of QPR fans now).

He definitely wants Palace to win. One of my greatest pleasures in life is phoning him from Selhurst to tell him we’ve just won; and if we haven’t won, he will sigh and say what he always says: ‘We just can’t score a bloody goal.’ He said that after I’d told him we’d just drawn 3-3 with Liverpool.

But there are just these little signs. If we’re playing Chelsea he will say ‘let’s hope it’s a draw’, but not in a way that suggests a draw would be a good result. If Palace are on telly he will look up from his Daily Mirror if he thinks something is happening, but when he watches Chelsea he kicks every ball.

I can’t get a private detective to follow him because he lives with me, but I need to do something to reassure myself he’s still a Palace fan. I don’t want to have to kick him out. A few days ago, I was in the kitchen cooking and listening to football on the radio, when he came positively galloping in from the front room to tell me Chelsea had scored. I said, ‘I know Dad, I heard it, I’m delighted for you.’ That led to two discussions: one about whether I was being sarcastic (yep) and then one about how come I heard it on the radio before he saw it on the telly and whether there was enough of a gap to put a bet on.

I genuinely worry about how enthusiastic he is for a team from an area that he has always dismissed as posh. And the area may be posh, Dad, but that is not a word you would ever have associated with the football club when I was growing up. Even now, awash with Russian billions though they are, there are still enough old-school ‘Chels’ fans to remind me of what a thoroughly well-planned exercise a trip to Stamford Bridge had to be back in the day.