Being a football fan is news. News to your mother, your wife
and everyone else who strives to shun you.
You must have a hard heart. A hard heart is not just a heart
to accept defeats and embarrassment; here, nigger needs more. Like, when
someone Hai-Faifs you for a greeting, you need to respond the same way you do
to those who ‘Honey’ and ‘Sweetheart’ you.
When people smile in public, you control yourself not to
oversmile. Trouble is that if you smile it all today, what shall you smile
tomorrow when your boys are being sixed right centre and left? Boss, you must
reserve your smile for future use. Free advice.
Then you happen to be in the stadium. Those hooligans have
hammered you one already and they have pitched camp in your half. You develop a
flying stomach and wish there was a washbush around. The big striker from the
opponent team is now making a threatening run into what you call your eighteen. You contract every muscle on your body. Contract your mouth and everything that
resembles a mouth. Clench a fist, grip your jaws and eyebrows get a muscle pull.
You hold that breath and before you realize your armpits are dripping, the
striker strikes! It hits the far pole back into the field of play. The ball is
cleared. Lucky. You free two muscles for the task ahead.
Being a fan is bad news.
Your mouth must learn to yell the hell throughout the ninety
that make a match. It must learn to change shape into parallelogram, square, rhombus
and that shape of amoeba; into shapes of the moon and the crescent. Can an
owww, a pout, an argh, and a snarl be made in the same second? You must master
the sounds of domestic animals and of those that mate in the bush. You must
learn to bark like a hound, croak like a toad, rattle like what rattles… you
just never know which player shall need what. To be that fan watching a live
game, you must also get much from choreographers and speech therapists.
Your tongue must be beyond adolescence. Click at the linesman
for raising that flag when your player makes the run for goal. You have been
waiting for this single run for the last seventy three minutes. Worse still,
the fella whom you bought the match ticket says the linesman is right; you get
an appetite for human flesh but suppress it. Your player gets yellow-carded for
saying what the referee does not want to hear. Second yellow. You kick at the bottle
closest to your leg, miss it by inches, hit your toe on a stone and shout
unprintables for the referee’s ear. You shout what you shouted to the
politician who stole your votes. Your heavy tongue tears another click for the
six-millionth time, you check whether all muscles of your body are still tight.
Before long, the game restarts and the first single touch sees the ball sail over
the twenty players in the middle before edging past an unprepared goon in your
goal post. Opponent fans explode into jubilation. You remember it is taboo to
cry.
Football be bad news, oga.
Trouble comes when the game is ending and the fans on your
side are as mute as silence. You start remembering bad things. You also
remember you have had a D-L-L-L-L-L luck in the last six outings. Even before your
last draw, you lost. That was when the current coach came. Now it is nil-nil
and the three minutes of added time are fast expiring. You are in prayers for a
goal. Your team is attacking hard. Your strikers are terrorizing their
defenders. Corner. Free kick. Corner. Throw-in. And then, God answers. Your striker
beats their goalkeeper and sets a low one for the empty goal. Followed by the
rest of the team, he starts running to the corner for celebration. You jump
with noise and intentionally step on the toes of the one joyriding on your
ticket. Little do you know that the ball has been cleared just from the line
and the bad guys are now running alone for the counter. The next time you open
your eyes, it is the turn for some heart attack. The net behind your goalkeeper
is shaking, the keeper is looking at the fans like a fool and Mr. Referee is
pointing to the centre. The coach must gooooo!
This thing is news!
You come back home and your wife thinks you are frowning for
her. You aren’t given a grace period to explain. She says it must be the girl
next door. Says she will claw her. In rage, she flushes your food in the sink
and announces there is no gas in the cylinder. Go eat where you ate lunch. You
remember you missed lunch and breakfast. You are still standing, Madam has switched
into her night dress – tight jeans – and the lights go off from the main switch.
A long mscheww.
Then your work place. First thing those people ask is how
you faired. When you win, no one asks. Today, even your boss calls you for a
chat. This is when Sam – and I don’t know why those mouthies always have to be Sam
or Frank – reports to work still putting on that faded jersey of his. And he
invites you for an evening drink, not that he will pay! Seeing your gloom, Sam
innocently reminds you that YOU played well. That YOU did not deserve that red
card. He wants a chat, this Sam, a chat where you must have a big African
heart. The gateman, from a distance, looks at you in a manner to suggest he
won’t mind weekend stories. That is when you realize you need to have preserved
smiles earlier.
Yet not even a single radio station runs your profile for
having not tethered yourself onto the ceiling!
