Last weekend I retreated inside the stadium from an away end seat at half-time with my team 2-0 down. Mood was low. As I shoved my way onto the packed concourse in search of liquid refreshment the atmosphere in the bowels of the stadium was totally different to what I’d left behind outside on the away terrace.
Supporters were stood on tables, jumping up and down, climbing on each others shoulders, screaming at the top of their lungs like the team had just lifted a trophy. They were filming each other, singing: “this is the best trip I’ve ever been on”.
Really mate? The best trip you’ve ever been on? That feels like a pretty low bar to me.
I'm all for being glass half full, but this is ridiculous. Ironically glasses were mostly empty, the majority being thrown rather than consumed. The pint chucking craze was fun for five minutes during the 2018 World Cup, but this is half time in February and the way the team have just played is very undeserving of a pint lob.
This is a not unfamiliar scene inside English football stadiums up and down the land. A ‘Concourse Army’ going ‘f**king mental’. Great stuff lads, but call me old fashioned: would this enthusiasm not be better served actually on the terraces? Where, like, players can hear you.
It’s a craze that seems to have developed among a particular demographic who are content to enter a sports stadium then spend the majority of their time on its concourse than properly inside the arena watching the sport.
I've been to enough away games to know that often the worst part of an away day is the actual football. But to watch little or none of the match during a football away day is beyond me.
After I’d consumed my half-time pint I went back outside into the away end to watch my team’s futile attempts to salvage the game. Dozens of empty seats were unoccupied for the second half.
Yes, you could argue that it’s much less fun out here than back at the bar with the Concourse Army, but maybe some volume in the stands would contribute to a 3-2 comeback that definitely would be more fun than hitting stuff on a stadium concourse like a zoo animal. (We eventually lost by three clear goals, so I’ll never know the answer to the above question).
But you see, on a concourse the lighting is generally better, as are the acoustics. There’s more things to bash and there’s no football match taking place in there that will distract from the act of 'going f**king mental'.
The pockets of empty seats are what annoys me most. Several ticketless friends had messaged me through the week about the possibility of a spare for this game.
I'll avoid the temptation to go a bit Four Yorkshiremen football edition, but are the Concourse Army a byproduct of social media? Would they be going 'f**kin mental' if they didn’t have smartphones and TikTok accounts to upload videos to?
To use their parlance, I think the whole thing really is f**king mental.
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