Who's the Daddy: Suffering a case of the blues

The Saturday before Christmas, me and a Blues supporting mate I’ve been friends with since the late 1980s watched his boyhood team get spanked by Blackburn Rovers at Ewood Park.

What struck me from the away end (apart from the two blue flares hurled over our heads into the six-yard box after Blackburn’s third went in) was the sheer number of people from Birmingham who took the time out of their lives to make the 220-mile round-trip to watch a nothing team.

Every single one of them deserves a refund and a hand-written letter of apology from the manager. Ordinarily I’d also demand a shirt signed by the first-team, but the kit they turned up in was like something from a toddler’s paint box. I don’t know too much about the Boys In Royal Blue but their traditional colours aren’t an orange and snot-green tiger print. No idea which colourblind dolt at Nike signed that one off but it looks like the aura around a migraine.

Thanks in the main to Peaky Blinders, the Birmingham accent is no longer the most effective contraceptive known to man. At first the Blues fans were a jovial, if lively, bunch who looked like they’d been through a lot together. The mood only soured after Chilean folk hero Ben Brereton Diaz coolly dispatched his spot-kick to put Rovers 3-0 up with half an hour of torture still to go.

There is no lonelier place than the away end of a football ground when the home side is taking your team to pieces. The colossal roar that greets each goal feels like a personal insult.

Honestly, they might as well shout “Your dad’s dead”, “Your grown-up children resent you” and “Your wife’s heard everything you’ve got to say and is bored of you”. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. After 80 minutes of a 4-0 hammering we’d seen enough. It was like watching a beloved family pet being put to sleep. Worse?

How could it possibly get any worse? How about a £35 parking ticket that greeted my buddy on his return to his car? Yeah, that’s worse.