A Hammer in the family

With tomorrow night’s fixture in mind, it’s an appropriate time to make an admission: my younger brother is a West Ham fan.

So why would an eight-year-old boy (as he was when he embarked on this reckless course) growing up in Bushey Heath want to support West Ham? It certainly wasn’t in his genes: Dad had grown up in Lincoln and occasionally mentioned fond memories of standing on the terraces at Sincil Bank, but that was as far as it went. As for me, I’d already been going to games at Vicarage Road for five years by that time, and was firmly hooked. Chris had come along with me and Dad a few times, but watching the Hornets obviously didn’t have the same effect on him.

And then, on the day of the 1975 FA Cup Final, he suddenly announced that he intended to support whichever team won that match. History records that West Ham United beat Fulham 2-0 that day, and so Chris became a West Ham fan. (He recently reminded me that he’d fallen off his bike that morning and had been ordered to rest, so I suspect some kind of traumatic brain damage may be at the root of all this.)

To his credit, he followed through on his promise and has been a West Ham fan ever since that day. Mind you, he’s what you’d call an armchair fan; I’m pretty sure he could count the number of Hammers games he’s attended on the fingers of one hand. And that’s probably why, whatever the result tomorrow night, there won’t be any brotherly gloating or goading going on.

In football supporting terms, we simply don’t meet on equal terms. I’m a fanatic, whereas he’s just a follower. In the tribal world we football fans inhabit, I’ve earned the right to respect by attending somewhere in the region of a thousand games over the course of 40-odd years, while he’s just watched some footy on the telly. Which means that, when our teams meet, I may not always support the winning team (hardly ever, if I’m honest), but at least I have the moral high ground.