Life of A Football Fan

Utkarsh Karmungikar
Std XII

Look, I am going to be honest here, I’d go mad if Football were to be cancelled from this world and I was about to when lockdown was declared. When the football world came to a standstill, I was livid. But thankfully the games were back just in time to save me from sheer insanity.
I’ve been a football fan for a better part of four years now. It was ironic how before those four years when I lived in the UAE, a country whose fanatics are majorly loyal to the football side, I was cricket-crazy and after coming back to my land, a country where cricket is religion, I am on the football side through and through. I am a damsel, one not in ‘distress’, but in ‘disorder’.
I still remember how after eight months of staying indoors, trapped, unable to put my feet through a football and occasionally breaking stuff trying to do so indoors, a football on the concrete of my society finally graced my feet. I know this all seems exaggerated. But what I felt then was overwhelming too. To be able to put my feet through a football with purpose was like releasing some of the stress-hormones brewed during lockdown, not that I had that much of them.
But that’s what playing football is anyways – a stress relief, a pleasure of sorts. Football is one of the ways I choose to express myself. I’ve learnt a lot about passion, about discipline, about motivation from football. At the very pinnacle of my passion for football, remains Manchester United – a club I love, a club I choose to associate with.
I can summarize my love for United through one instance. A few weeks ago we (when I say we, I mean Man United) were losing, and one of our players played a bad pass. I got angry and absolutely thumped the sofa I was sitting on with my hands, so much so that it rattled off the ground and rested again. My sister was on that sofa (who surprisingly didn’t feel much of it). My dad was having none of it. He came and slapped the T.V. shut, and honestly who could blame him? We lost that game. But at the end of the day someone has to lose.
These instances however are something fans forget about in a day, perhaps even have a laugh about in hindsight, and get back to backing their team. And that’s called passion, that’s football. The same sort of roar will come from me when United score against Liverpool, except this time it will be of happiness, of adrenaline. Football is nothing without the fans, and the banter. And until fans are not back in the stadia, football will never remain the same. But still, it will always be something that will never fail to make my day.