Day 40 - The perils of fandom.

Let me start by saying I didn’t break my leg, I seem to be quite good at cleaning up olive oil.

Anyway anyone who has every supported a sports team will know just how tiresome it becomes. As long as I can remember, I have been a fan of either Cardiff RFC, Cardiff Blues, or Wales which means every match day is a happy/sad event, a combination of heaven and hell pleasure and pain, reward and torture, you get the picture. 

It starts one, two, three days before with the excitement, the anticipation and the blind optimism that a win will be celebrated by the end of the game. But as kick off approaches doubts begin to creep in, the strengths of the opposition seem too great to deal with, a defeat seems inevitable.

Then just before kick off the butterflies in the stomach start, more than butterflies actually, bats, eagles, pterodactyls that cause an incurable restlessness.

Then we are in to the game and that is where the tension gets to boiling point. You want a close, exciting game to get the juices flowing but of course that will be agonising, nerve wracking, unbearable. So you also want your team to run away with it, give the opposition a thumping. calm the nerves, make things easy. But then the win is somehow less satisfying and the game gets a bit boring. So basically the whole thing is mass of contradictions and basically murder.

Why am I telling you this? Well I thought that when I started watching rugby in Prague, I would be a disinterested spectator, just enjoy the game without the pressure of fandom. I affiliated myself with a team but it was just a loose association, not the cut me and I bleed blue and black feeling that I have for Cardiff. I called Praga them, or my team. But slowly, like a ninja cat hunting a teddy bear, fandom has crept up on me.  Gradually I’ve become a supporter of Medvedi, now I call them us or we. So all the nerves, the churning, the optimism and pessimism is back. How did that happen?

By the way we won today. Thumped Sparta, but the first ten minutes was close and those nerves were churning.