You're only ever one result away from a fag

Football's dark and bitter comedy is enough to drive anyone to smoking
Hull City

Earlier this week I was fondly recalling the days when football fans threw toilet rolls on to the field. "They threw other stuff, too," I waffled nostalgically. "If memory serves, Hull fans used to pelt goalkeeper Ian 'Keckers' McKechnie with oranges, because he'd once told the local paper he liked them. Just as well the Tigers' custodian hadn't expressed a fondness for melons or coconuts, or he'd likely have suffered brain damage. But it was toilet rolls that were thrown mainly."

"The Boro have been that bad this season, I've been tempted to throw the whole toilet," a friend said in response, "and I wouldn't have flushed it first either." When I laughed he said, "I actually mean it." But that, of course, was what made it funny. In football the best jokes are dragged from despair, like smouldering fruit bushes from a badly located bonfire.

A few years ago now I received an email from a Bolton fan recalling the mid-60s at Burnden Park. Back then managerial and coaching duties fell to Bill Ridding who served as club secretary and sat on the board. Ridding apparently used to stand on the touchline smoking a pipe and wearing a homburg. At some point around 1966 irate Trotters fans took to serenading him with a song that included the lyric, "Resign Ridding, resign/Resign Ridding, resign/Take off you hat/You fucking great twat/Resign Ridding, resign."

If you follow a football team the biggest belly laughs you ever get are when you're standing on the edge of the abyss. If Manchester City added Fernando Torres to their real-life Panini sticker album of stars, he might bring goals but the gags would dry up. No wonder Ricky Hatton looked glum at the Emirates on Saturday. The man's watched 20 years of sour wisecracks disappearing down the plughole. Jerry Seinfeld once observed, "You can't have sex with someone you admire. Where's the depravity?" Likewise you can't joke if you're successful. It sounds like smug triumphalism.

This is undoubtedly the best time of the year for those of us who revel in the national game's dark and bitter comedy. It is not, however, a good time for any fan to give up smoking. A friend of mine who supports Hartlepool quit tobacco as a New Year's resolution. He may have expected his football club to give him a helping hand as he battled withdrawal symptoms, but not a bit of it. Instead of the humdrum, mid-table mediocrity he might reasonably have anticipated when he first mooted the idea of quitting, he's had to nicotine-patch his way through a nine-game run of away defeats and now, just when he thought things were easing up and he was down to 15 Kit Kats a match, the threat of the three-point deduction over fielding the suspended Gary Liddle in a game against Brighton has turned up to torment him.

"You'd imagine, given the situation, that the FA would make a decision quickly," he said desperately on Monday. I know just what you're thinking, and you're right: when people start talking gibberish like that you really do see how totally addled their brain is by lack of chemical stimuli. Next thing the poor sap will be expressing disappointment that Garth Crooks isn't going to be the BBC's main reporter at the World Cup, or that Barry Davies has retired.

I have to admit I have a good deal of sympathy for my friend. Because, as anyone who has ever given up smoking will know, the minute you quit you start looking for an excuse to start again. I gave up a 20-a-day habit in 1988 and I still find myself approaching any scenario that threatens doom with thoughts along the lines of, "Well, if I do lose a leg wielding this chainsaw in a foolhardy manner, at least no one will begrudge me having a fag." To be honest, until the smoking ban on aircraft there were times on long-haul flights when I've been practically willing the damn plane to go into a nose dive just so a I could snap up a carton of duty frees and start puffing away again.

What makes it worse for my friend is that due to work commitments he has to follow the scores from Pools' matches via 5 Live score updates. As every fan knows this is the most torturous experience anyone can willingly put themselves through. It is the sporting equivalent of natural childbirth and Mark Pougatch is the midwife.

As this weekend's crunch game against Exeter approaches, I wonder if my friend will be capable of sticking to the plan he and his wife drew up for this day in January. Or whether, as the full horror of what he has let himself in for begins to take hold and John Murray starts to tighten his grip and the icy words, "Now an interesting scoreline from Victoria Park which could have a bearing on the League One relegation situation …", he will crackcompletely and bellow: "Bollocks to what I said four months ago, give me my drugs and give them me now."

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