Football, gambling and Faith

Well, we (Bristol City) lost. 1-0. I really thought we would win before the game. We played OK. Not as well as we can, but lost to a team who had one moment of brilliance and defended pretty well. So the whole season ends with a whimper not a bang. For us anyway.

Someone asked me did I enjoy the game? Presumably having paid an arm and a leg for a ticket, going to the most famous stadium in the world, spending an afternoon with old friends would be a good day out. So did I enjoy it? The honest answer is no, I didn’t enjoy it. I spent the whole game in a state of nervous tension and anxiety, on the edge of my seat, with a knot in my stomach willing the ball with increasing desperation into the Hull net, but it never happened. So no it wasn’t an enjoyable experience, but then you don’t go to football to enjoy it. It doesn’t work like that. It struck me that supporting a team is a bit like gambling (or at least what I guess gambling is like – not that I would know). Anyway, I imagine if you’re in some high-pressure poker game, you don’t enjoy it, you endure it, hoping to get the win, and risking the loss. It’s like that at football – I knew all the second half yesterday that if we won, or even just scored, it would give the most incredible rush of emotion, joy and ecstasy. Yet if we didn’t it would just be that dull misery, tinged with resentful envy of what the Hull fans were experiencing - just what we desperately wanted to. So you gamble. Knowing it’s either one or the other. You go to the game knowing you will not feel gentle satisfaction at the end of the game, like you do after a good film or concert – it will be either total joy or dull despair. But the gamble is worth it. Yesterday it was the dull despair. One day (as it was at the end of last season against Rotherham, when we went up on the last day of the season) it will be joy. And that is why we do it. Because risking it all going wrong for the sake of the possibility of joy is hard-wired into us. The possibility that there might be utter happiness at the end is worth risking everything for. Pascal was right - we have to wager everything.