After Watford played Brentford at home last season, I asked my friend Stuart how on Earth he and his fellow Bees fans could justify singing things like “Is this a library?” when the Rookery End, inspired by the 1881, had been making a racket for pretty much the entire 90 minutes.
He replied that in the Vicarage Road End, they couldn’t hear anything of the sort – and maybe it’s the acoustic peculiarities of the ground that are to blame for my current irritation. Because I’m getting a bit fed up of away fans reeling out the same old tired chants about the Watford fans not singing when we clearly are. The Leicester fans were at it again yesterday.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like my football songs to make sense. I admit that when Watford fans, buoyed by a particularly fine performance, sing “We’re by far the greatest team/The world has ever seen”, it’s not a claim that would pass unchallenged in any court in the land, but we can be forgiven the occasional excess of exuberance. On the other hand, singing “Sh*t ground, no fans” at the newly spruced-up Vicarage Road when there’s scarcely an empty seat to be seen is just stupid.
The more fundamental problem I have with this is simply this: who cares? If you go to a football ground and the home fans don’t sing or chant, what does it matter?
Don’t get me wrong – I love singing, and I think the 1881 have done an incredible job in coaxing the historically reticent Watford fans into creating something that can occasionally, genuinely, be called a cauldron of noise.
On the other hand, no one ever won a trophy because their fans sang louder than the other team’s. Let’s look at the English clubs with the most famously passionate fans: clubs like Wolves, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Manchester City, Sunderland. How many trophies have any of that lot won in the past 20 years or so? Okay, City have won a couple, but it was Abu Dhabi oil dollars that made the difference, not mouthy Mancs.
No, it’s the infamously silent prawn sandwich munchers of Old Trafford and the team that used to play at a ground known as the ‘Highbury library’ that have carried off most of the silverware in modern times. (Chelsea fans aren’t particularly vocal either, unless the caterers have run out of smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels.) In other words, there’s no correlation between the noisiness of a team’s fans and their propensity to win football matches.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t sing our hearts out, of course. It makes us feel good, for one thing. Moreover, the players always say they appreciate it, and I have no reason to doubt them when they say it matters to them.
But at the same time, I secretly long for the day when an entire home crowd stays pointedly silent for 90 minutes while their team wipes the floor with the opposition, just to prove that all the playground yah-boo-sucks ‘we make more noise than you’ nonsense actually makes no difference whatsoever.
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