A pleasant little article that featured yesterday. I usually immediately consign this part of the newspaper to the recycling, but this caught my eye. Michael Hann The Guardian, Saturday 24 August 2013 Taking his nine-year-old to matches is a joy for both of them, says Michael Hann, even if the boy does follow QPR, consume too many sugary drinks ⦠and swear: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/24/my-son-football-fan-qpr It is a sunny Saturday at the start of March, and we are on the train to Southampton, where QPR are playing that afternoon. When we get to our destination, we will be heading to the pub for an hour or so, then traipsing to the ground, via some potentially deadly burger van. We are seven in number, and across our two tables are strewn an array of sandwich wrappers, lager cans, empty bottles of pop, and a load of cards carrying football quiz questions. The pop and cards belong to my son, Gabe, who is nine and in his element. He shouts out the questions, waiting for the indulgent laughter as the men â yes, we are all men; none of our wives or girlfriends is interested in coming â yell back the answers. "Come on, Gabe," demands Jamie â Gabe's favourite among our occasional touring party â "one more." And Gabe obliges. My son loves away trips. He likes the sugary drinks (sometimes too much, as when I had to rush him to the toilet to vomit 10 minutes into our game at Norwich a couple of years back. I told him that he had learned an important lesson: he hadn't eaten his tuna sandwich, so he had been drinking on an empty stomach. Bad mistake). He likes standing and singing with 3,000 others (though I've forbidden him to sing "We pay your benefits," to northern fans). Occasionally â though not much over the dreadful past couple of years â he likes the football. But most of all, he likes the company of men. And I like being with him, seeing him holding his own with men 20 or 30 years his senior, laughing with them. I watch this little boy with his cherubic face, his golden mop, and I think: I'm looking forward to hanging out with you when you are grown up. When people write about fathers and sons through the prism of football, it tends to melancholy: the young Nick Hornby telling in Fever Pitch about being taken to Arsenal by his uninterested father, after his parents have separated; Gary Imlach's memoir My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes, focusing on what he didn't know about his father, a professional player; Duncan Hamilton's The Footballer Who Could Fly, with its line about the author's father: "Without football, we were strangers under a shared roof. With it, we were father and son." That strain of thought even cropped up on the last series of The Apprentice, when we saw the bullish Neil Clough talking about feeling he'd let his dad down by not having been good enough a footballer to turn professional. That's not the way I feel: my memories of watching football with my dad are tinged with no sadness, and going to games with my boy is a fortnightly highlight. And when I look at and listen to the families around me in the West Paddock at Loftus Road, what I register is people for whom this is part of family life, not a substititute for it. Football becomes an emotional prism for those men who like the game because the football stadium is a place where emotions are expressed freely and without constraint. We remember footballing stories about our fathers and our grandfathers precisely because these are the incidents that stand out from our memories of them at home. I never knew my paternal grandfather â he died when I was one â and though I know next to nothing about the 36 years he spent in the navy from 1914 to 1950, I know about him going to Borough Park every Saturday to watch Workington. I know about him being so excited about one home win when Bill Shankly was managing that he walked home, forgetting he had driven to the match. I know about his regular response when asked if there was much of a crowd: "Aye, me and the other bloke." As for my father, I know that he went to watch West Bromwich Albion at home a few days after his first child â my sister â was born and, seeing a friend across the terrace, scrambled over to tell him the news of his fatherhood, only to trip on a step and break his wrist. I know that at university in Birmingham, he once played with the Wolves and England player Bill Slater. And I remember him, at one of my first QPR matches in 1978, behaving to a stranger in a way I'd never seen before â forcefully telling a very drunk, and very foul-mouthed, Scotsman sitting behind us to moderate his language. Already, one incident involving Gabe has passed into family legend â after a game two years ago at Doncaster, at which he had been detailing to our party (with my permission) all the swearing he had heard from QPR's then manager, Neil Warnock (our seats at Loftus Road are right by the home dugout, and we can hear everything the coaches say). We were staying at my in-laws' house in Nottinghamshire that night and, when we got back, Gabe's granny asked him what the best things about the day had been. "We went in a taxi, and no one wore a seat belt because there were too many of us!" he replied. "And I had a foot-long hotdog! And Daddy let me say: '****ing ****!'" Oh, Gabe ⦠There seems to be an assumption from those who dislike football â or perhaps those who are simply cynical â that it is a substitute for an emotional connection between fathers and sons, as if we come together through the game to make up for the fact that we are separate in the rest of our life. And books about strained or silent relationships, flowering only beneath the artificial light of the pylons at the corners of the pitch, add to that myth. My footballing relationship with Gabe was set on his terms, not mine. I wasn't seeking some way to bond with him; at six years old, he realised football was his passport to playground popularity and decided he was going to become an expert football fan. His first task was to find a team to support, and so he asked if I would take him to see Arsenal, our nearest club. It is almost impossible to get tickets, and I can't afford them anyway. But how about this club where I had a season ticket before you were born? Yes, they are a bit rubbish, but we can go every week. And â unlike Arsenal fans â you won't be perpetually annoyed that the rest of football is ignoring your divine right to win trophies. What I didn't tell him is that supporting a mediocre football team provides a perfect preparation for real life: long periods of alternating boredom and misery, from which you pluck what beads of sensation you can, punctuated by occasional and almost unimaginable elation. And so, at Christmas 2009, I bought us half-season tickets for QPR. And that half season was pretty wretched. The next season was better, as QPR won promotion to the Premier League, playing with style and panache. Each week, as QPR put some other side to the sword, I warned Gabe: "Try to remember this. This is as good as supporting Rangers will ever get. Once we're promoted it'll be miserable losses every week." And so it is. But it's not supporting Rangers that so entrances Gabe, it's being a football supporter. It's the door that it opens to another world: one where adult men are neither authority figures, nor dangerous strangers, but one where they are just as stupid, feckless and ready for a terrible joke as any nine-year-old is. So what he remembers about going to West Bromwich Albion is not a wretched defeat in a terrible game, but his hilarity about some of our group panicking about getting caught by a police officer while urinating under a railway station bridge. What he remembers about going to Norwich is not another wretched defeat in a terrible game, but the cans of beer strewn across the tables in first class, and the photos of he took of everyone pulling their most horrible faces. I tell my wife she should come with us to an away game, to see what her son is like in this company. She says she won't: it's a male thing, and she's fine with that (I also think she knows she would only try to stop the fun, out of simple parental concern that this isn't the appropriate environment for her precious little boy). Maybe, in four or five years, Gabe will want to go to football without his dad, and without his dad's mates. We will probably be too boring by then, or too embarrassing. He might want to find friends of his own to hang around with before the game, to sit with during it, to come home with afterwards. But I am not stupid. He will never get away. Why do you think I started taking him to a club that no one else he knows supports?
God love my two boys. Rrrs fans and already getting stick at school about how crap Rangers are. Never even met another Rangers fan. Conal, 9, said to me, "it doesn't matter Dad, we'll come good again". A little bit of faith can go a long way.
Not just father and sons. As many of you know I took my daughter Lizzy to her first match last year (@@@@ Wigan).....she is now living in Bournemouth....but phoned me at 2.30 yesterday to sing "We are the Champions" down the phone to me. I cried
Thats a nice piece Sku I dragged my reluctant 15 year old son to Huddersfield the other week strictly on the basis that he could have 'a pie and a coke' otherwise 'im not going' Walking to the ground i could sense his apprehension of being amongst the home fans and listening to the banter When we got into the ground and kept my end of the bargain with a terrible pie he settled down 5 minutes into the match he said 'WE'RE going to beat them 2 nil'- obviously he hasn't had the years of underachievment weve had - and then asked me about the words to some of the more 'graphic' chants and songs. He was fascinated On the way out he said 'WE should have won that' Hopefully he'll be blighted by supporting the R's like i have We got home and when my wife asked him was it any good? 'No, it was rubbish im not going again' Yesterday he asked if i had got Leeds tickets yet - poor sod, hes hooked
Great thread. My son in not yet 2 but can't wait to take him. What do you guys think is an expectable age to start bringing your sons/daughters to the game?
Two is a bit young so I'd probably hold for a while and wait until he is at least another 4 weeks older.
I took my son to notts forest at 8 week's old! He didn't see much if it but we have the pictures as part of his life history. As a sidenote: we nearly didn't get in! And I think most grounds have an upper age limit to prevent really small children from going in
As I split from my ex when my 2 older lads were babies, taking them to football has been a time of real 'Father/Sons' bonding. We've had some fantastic times following Rangers with them and hope they take their kids too (Just seems strange to see eldest son having a 'legal' beer now). Best quote after a dire loss a few years back was ' don't worry dad, it's easy following a successful team like Man U or Chelsea, but we follow Rangers, and we always will'
