Now, football really IS coming home

Let's not dwell on Sunday's result in Berlin shall we?  It's all too easy to point the finger at the static Kane and equally static Southgate, but this is a Poppies blog so writing about quality footballers is well outside of our comfort zone.  The England international set-up will be going through a hefty transitional phase over the coming weeks and months, giving the football-obsessed nation a chance to go away and catch-up on some of the other things in life such as families and trying to convince bosses they've been unwell for the past month.

So, in every real sense, football WILL be coming home.  Coming home to those of us that watch the game week in and week out.  Those of us that stand out in the freezing February sleet only to see our team succumb to a home defeat in the last minute.  Those of us who take short trips to places like St. Ives only to watch our team grimly hold-on to a mere 6-0 defeat.  Those of us who travel hundreds of miles to see a game only for it to be called off at 2.55PM.

In short, this week, football has been handed back to the few by the many.  The many who are even now packing away their barbeques, and cancelling their daily Ocado order for 24-packs of Corona and San Miguel.  The many who equate football with the summer, copious food, back gardens and think it is normal to commence drinking 8-hours before a game starts.  They assume this is how real football fans watch their football.  All pink-tinged BBQ food and monstrous hangovers.

In reality, supporting real football is more mundane.  For one, you have to pace yourself.  A 9-month football season is the very definition of a marathon over the sprint of a Tournament - a 100 metre sprint for England fans and a 10 metre sprint for our Caledonian cousins.  If you attacked a league season like the Euros you would be in rehab before the first frost threatened a fixture.  

Real football is by no means the booze-fest it appears on the television.  Ten pints in your sunny back garden then snoring your way through the actual game while sprawled in the kids' paddling pool is one thing.  Trying to thread your motor out of the Alumasc carpark with a skinfull is another!  A day-long bevy in The Peacock followed by a heady mixture of vomiting and kebabs is just about survivable.  Whereas finding your car in a Stourbridge back street and negotiating the M6 when alcohol has fogged your brain and vision is not something Patgod would recommend.

So, while England shirts and flags are packed away for the next couple of years and large swathes of our neighbours go back to being barely-armchair fans who don't know the difference between an indirect and direct free kick (er....unlike the rest of us.....) football is coming back home, where it belongs, to the long suffering fans until it's prised out of our grasp again for the next
World Cup.

God knows what they'll look like when we
finally do manage to bring it home.