It's No Wonder We're All Such A

I Have Learned Things From The Game. Much Of My Knowledge Of Locations In Britain And Europe Comes Not From School, But From Away Games Or The Sports Pages, And Hooliganism Has Given Me Both A Taste For Sociology And A Degree Of Fieldwork Experience. I Have Learned The Value Of Investing Time And Emotion In Things I Cannot Control, And Of Belonging To A Community Whose Aspirations I Share Completely And Uncritically.

It Is A Strange Paradox That While The Grief Of Football Fans(and It Is Real Grief) Is Private - We Each Have An Individual Relationship With Our Clubs, And I Think That We Are Secretly Convinced That None Of The Other Fans Understands Quite Why We Have Been Harder Hit Than Anyone Else - We Are Forced To Mourn In Public, Surrounded By People Whose Hurt Is Expressed In Forms Different From Our Own.

And What Would Happen If We Never Read The Classics? There Comes A Point In Life, It Seems To Me, Where You Have To Decide Whether You're A Person Of Letters Or Merely Someone Who Loves Books, And I'm Beginning To See That The Book Lovers Have More Fun.

But What Else Can We Do When We're So Weak? We Invest Hours Each Day, Months Each Year, Years Each Lifetime In Something Over Which We Have No Control; It Is Any Wonder Then, That We Are Reduced To Creating Ingenious But Bizarre Liturgies Designed To Give Us The Illusion That We Are Powerful After All, Just As Every Other Primitive Community Has Done When Faced With A Deep And Apparently Impenetrable Mystery?

The Trouble With History Is That There Are Too Many People Involved