Only Singing When The Team Is Winning

If you’re not a football fan you might like to stop reading this particular posting right now. If you’re a croquet fan then as usual, there will be absolutely fuck all for you in this blog. Ever.

But back to the football, specifically the Wellington Phoenix who are an average team in an average league. Don’t get me wrong, I love what they’ve done for football in this city as far as the kids are concerned who now have very real heroes they can look up to and idolise in person every other week. My ten year old son has the top, the ball and the flag, all of which were ridiculously overpriced as is all supporters wear in this country and he’s not alone, Phoenix wear is everywhere.

But I’m not so easily sucked in by all the yellow and black tat or the free poster they give away in the paper each season. Maybe it’s the 25 odd years of supporting the one club, or maybe it’s just that I’m a depressing bastard but I find it very hard to get excited about the Phoenix quite as much as self appointed ‘Yellow Army’ has.

Or to be more precise Ricki Herbert’s Yellow Army, as one of the main chants that the group belt out ad nauseum explains. Why they chose ‘yellow’ when for the first few seasons the side wore black is a mystery to me, maybe it was the badge; it’s yellow and black. Black is cooler of course but screaming out that you’re part of a ‘black army’ has so many negative connotations it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Incidentally I’ve been watching a fantastic series on Discovery on the Second World War called ‘Apocalypse’ which they’re showing to mark the anniversary of the conflict. The footage has been re-mastered and is all in colour and is absolutely terrific because so often film from that period is in stark black and white. The thing that really struck me though was just how damn tight those Nazis were in terms of colour coordination.

Black on brown, red on black, grey on black; they might have been a strapon short of a good night in the smarts department but boy could those dudes accessorise. Every movie or TV show that has ripped off that long black leather trench coat look owes Adolf & Co. a big ‘right on’ for pioneering it. If only he and his cronies had of copyrighted it, they would be rich, dead pricks by now.

But back to the Phoenix. Ricki Herbert is the coach of the team and he’s a nice enough fella. He loves ‘The Army’ but then he would, because so far they haven’t turned on him, not even when the team is playing depressingly conservative football like they seem to do most of the time.

Against Adelaide the Army turned against everyone else but Ricki and the players, instead targeting the officials and every Adelaide player who was a ‘cheating Aussie bastard’, even the foreign ones. Which says a lot about The Army if you ask me; they might make a lot of noise, at least for the first 30 minutes, but like most attempts at chanting at a New Zealand sports event it starts and finishes decidedly low brow.

But then that’s football fans for you. At its lowest common denominator it’s a mob mentality and if you chose your moment wisely you could yell out almost anything and it would become a chant. Quite how many rounds of “I love cock” you would get is a moot point; the fact is you would get some before the realisation kicked in that it had nothing to with the game.

Unfortunately the game itself was quite boring and you can take that from someone who has watched a lot of football over the years, some of which has been dead set boring. Certainly the three or four ‘fans’ standing behind us thought so and spent a good hour discussing everything under the sun bar the actual game. Ricki Herbert’s Yellow Army was decidedly quiet too, bar the occasional predictibal chants that my two ten year olds found highly amusing but then to them, swearing is.

Luckily I didn’t have to pay for our seats (which are yellow, maybe that’s it) so I don’t feel so bad about wasting 90 minutes of my life that I will never get back. But I do wonder when Ricki Herbert’s Yellow Army will start to feel the same, especially as they only seem to sing when the team is winning...