Crying Over Sport
Words by Dylan Mangan.
I’ll never forget the first time I cried over a game of football: 15th May 2005. I was 8 at the time and had yet to be introduced to any kind of sporting heartbreak. I was an innocent soul who loved playing outside, with my Mother acting as teammate/opponent. Chelsea were the best team in the league and so, without any family allegiances to influence me, they were the team of my choice. Glory-hunting was the game and I excelled. However, with sport comes suffering and the 2004/2005 season brought plenty of it.
A big part of my obsession with football was thanks to RTÉ’s wonderful The Premiership. Like Match of the Day, it showed highlights and analysis of the day's games. It was broadcast two whole hours before its English counterpart and was much easier to get permission to stay up for. It’s where I first got to know how football works through the often hilarious analysis of Brady, Giles, Dunphy et al. To a child these men were the smartest people in the world, at least at the beginning. RTÉ also had 15 whole live games on that season - a laughable idea in today’s multi-billion broadcasting rights landscape. In a Sky Sportsless house, this was the Celtic Tiger at its finest and most charitable. It helped that the intro to the show was just as good as Match of the Day’s, if not better.
Despite my natural urge to be on the winning side, throughout the 2004/2005 season there was a team other than Chelsea that caught my eye. Norwich spent most of their season as one of the worst teams in the division, winning only three of their first 31 games. Even though they were terrible, I couldn’t help but root for them. They played in brilliant bright yellow jerseys, had players with fun names like Darren Huckerby and Jason Shackell, and their manager looked like he should have been coaching a gaelic football team but got the sports mixed up.
With 7 games left in the season Norwich were rock-bottom of the table, 7 points from safety with a brutal goal difference of -33. Each week’s analysis of their games consisted of pundits trying and failing to find ways that they could improve to stay up. Nobody had any hope, least of all me. The guys on TV said they would be relegated, so they were going to be relegated.
One glimmer of hope came in the shape of record transfer and powerful striker Dean Ashton. He joined in the January transfer window for £5.40m and gave the team a real boost just when it was needed. While he got off to a slow start, goals such as the one below warmed him to my young heart.
An impudent consolation goal against Man City doesn’t help you avoid relegation, but it was a sign of things to come. In six games from 9th April to 7th May, results were as follows:
Norwich City 2-0 Manchester United
Crystal Palace 3-3 Norwich City
Norwich City 2-1 Newcastle United
Norwich City 1-0 Charlton Athletic
Southampton 4-3 Norwich City
Norwich City 1-0 Birmingham City
13 points out of a possible 18, more wins in six games than in the previous 31 - those idiot pundits didn’t know a thing! Norwich were on the march. Survival beckoned and I was going to be part of it. With one game to go, all they needed to do was match the results of the teams below them. A win guarantees safety and the glory that comes with it. This was perhaps the most invested in a game of football I had ever been up to this point.
The final day of the season, 15th May 2005, saw Norwich travel to Craven Cottage to face Fulham, who were sat in mid-table with nothing to prove or lose. The Canaries hadn’t won a single game away from home all season but despite that fact, I was confident. I had studied the team through my sticker book, so I knew all the players names and they couldn’t possibly let a young innocent boy down, could they?
I sat down to watch the game in anticipation - only problem being that RTÉ, now my enemies, weren’t showing the Norwich game. No, they had decided to show West Brom vs Portsmouth. Who would want to watch that? West Brom were bottom for goodness sake! They were going to get relegated. Nonetheless, football is football, so I settled in to bask in the satisfaction of watching West Brom go down at my team of the month’s expense.
With such a precarious situation - 4 teams battling for 17th position and safety - RTÉ provided goal updates from the other games throughout West Brom’s. The first update came after 10 minutes - Fulham 1-0 Norwich. I was disappointed but my belief didn’t waver. They couldn't lose when I didn’t want them to, that’s not how sport works. 35 minutes, another update, another Fulham goal. This happened four more times and Norwich lost 6-0. I couldn’t believe it. It was such a bad result that at one point I believed RTÉ were deliberately misleading me in a sick attempt to make my joy even more emphatic when I found out the real result - a Norwich victory, of course.
It wasn’t until the end of the game, when the cameras cut to the scenes at Craven Cottage and I saw my favourite sticker player Jason Shackell in tears, that I accepted defeat. I felt stupid for believing, and my own tears followed. My Mum forced us out for a walk as soon as the game was over and I moped my way along the road, pretending the worst hadn’t happened, wishing for the morning again.
That day was one of the worst of my life at that point, but I look back on it with great fondness now. Another nostalgic day for me came later that month in the form of Istanbul and Liverpool’s miraculous comeback to win the Champions League. Both memories hold important places in my heart to this day. Nostalgia tends to be reserved for moments of joy, or simple pleasures long gone, but when I reminisce on important sporting moments in my life, Fulham Six, Norwich Nil will always jump to mind.
