Emotions & ambitions: The curse on a football fan

Gone are those days when all that mattered was representing your city and fighting for its glory. Ambition has taken over emotions and we can’t blame anyone. It’s all a part of professionalism after all. It’s a job, an occupation. I can give you cornucopia of examples where professional football players have chosen money over everything else or chosen emotions over trophies. It all depends on the player and we as fans, should accept and respect it.

I am a Liverpool fan and let me tell you, one of the most annoying thing about a typical Liverpool fan is that he is emotionally sapless. And I was,and maybe still, like that. When a certain Fernando Torres joined Chelsea FC, it left me heart broken.

I, like many other people, overreacted. But now when I think about it , I feel it’s all justified. It’s his life, his choice and we should defer to it. He won Champions league for Chelsea. Now that’s something he dreamed all his life. He chose his personal ambition over Liverpool’s and Reds have no right to hate him because of that. The problem is that after seeing players like Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Del Piero & Gigi Buffon , we expect everyone to be that loyal. Now again, do we have any right to expect this from everyone? NO. And then there are players like Zlatan Ibrahimovic. It’s all about football no strings attached for him – Fair enough!

It hurts, yes. We are just fans. These players are living our dreams. The vicarious experience is awesome but a wee bit anguishing too. We can’t help but admire, praise and expect greatness from these players. Such expectations only add to the extreme pressure which these players are already battling against. Now let’s talk about what these players call nowadays – Projects.

If you ask me, it’s a plastic word. It’s rude and disrespectful. This is not me speaking, this is an emotional Liverpool fan speaking. But when I heard David Silva And Yaya Toure talking about Man City in the same way, I could embrace what they meant. Every player wants to win trophies. Some of them for themselves and some of them for the people. Yaya Toure won everything he could at Barcelona and he wished for a new challenge. So calling Man City a bright project was totally justified. Take the example of Flying Dutchman Robin Van Perise. At this age, he knew he wasn’t getting any younger and in order to fulfil his ambition of winning trophies, he joined SAF at Man Utd. Do you blame him? No.

There are two kinds of Football fans – those who support a club and those who support a player.

I know this guy who is a die hard Fernando Torres fan. He used to support Liverpool earlier but now supports Chelsea! Crazy? Well that is how things are. When I started following football, for some weird reason I used to have unreasonable expectations from the players. And when I see some of the younger fans these days I can see the same emotions. All I want to say is that it’s unfair. Unfair to players and unfair to us. Getting attached so much to a player then blaming them – it’s not cool. It’s funny how fortunes of a player/club so far away from us affects us to such extent.

I say let’s take a minute and feel sorry for all those people who don’t have football in their life. You are lucky to not be one of them. So support without any expectations and enjoy the beautiful game.