Some thoughts about singing at football matches

1) Singing at football matches is fun
That feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself, part of an ecstatic, bellowing mass of humanity all hell-bent on encouraging your team to greater heights – you can’t beat that, can you?

I haven’t read much football history, but I suspect this may have been one of the key factors in football’s first upswing in popularity in the late 19th century: the chance for factory workers, miners, steelworkers and whoever else to get away from the monotony of their jobs for one afternoon a week and sing “Come on you [insert team name here]!”, knowing that this was a passion they’d chosen for themselves, and one that they shared with thousands of their fellow supporters.

2) Singing at football matches is hard to get going
It’s like starting a fire, essentially. The first spark catches, the fire spreads through the tinder around it, and then onto the kindling around that. But if the kindling is damp, the fire will stop spreading and soon burn itself out.

That’s what happened in the Watford end at Wembley last week. From where I was sitting, diagonally up from the right corner flag on the lower tier, I could clearly see the 1881 jumping up and down, singing and waving. But I couldn’t actually hear them, because between them and me there were hundreds of people standing silently, the damp kindling that stopped the fire from spreading. We did our best in our section, but there’s only so much noise you can make if the people around you won’t join in.

3) Singing at football matches should be spontaneous
I can’t have been the only person at Wembley who found the Palace fans’ scarily well-coordinated celebrations after their first goal (which encompassed the entire lower tier from one corner flag to the other, around 6,000 people, all singing and waving flags in time) reminiscent of a Nuremburg rally. How did they do that? Did they have mass practice sessions in Crystal Palace Park the week before? Or was some kind of coercion involved? (“You vill sing ‘Glad all over’ or you vill not see your children again.”)

For me, the best moments in a football crowd are the spontaneous ones. At Upton Park, a few days before the semi-final, someone behind me started up the Valon Behrami chant to the tune of ‘La Bamba’. Okay, it may have been practised in the pub before the game, but the singers still took a while to master the tricky rhythm, and it needed a hoarse-voiced MC to yell “three-four-five-six-seven-eight” between verses to keep it going in time. But keep it going he did, for quite long sections of the game, and it was fantastic. I can honestly say I enjoyed singing that more than I enjoyed Sebastian Prödl’s bizarre consolation goal.

4) Singing at football matches doesn’t make any difference to the result
I wrote about this recently, so I won’t rehearse the argument again. Suffice it to say that if having passionate fans made any real difference, Sunderland and Newcastle wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of relegation right now.

Of course, the fact that it doesn’t make a difference is no reason not to sing. (See point 1, above.)

5) Singing at football matches is not compulsory
I love singing, lots of us do, but it’s not a condition of entry to the ground. Quite frankly, I don’t want to see 10-year-olds joining in with a rendition of “You’re f***ing sh*t”, and I wouldn’t expect to see OAPs doing so either.

Moreover, Watford’s support is (and probably always will be) more middle-class and reserved than that of many of our rivals, what with South-West Hertfordshire being one of the wealthier and more comfortable parts of the country, and there are always going to be plenty of fans, even in the Rookery Stand, who are not natural singers. That doesn’t make them bad people, or bad supporters for that matter. It just means the rest of us have to sing a bit louder.