Non League Day

weymouthPIE · September 4, 2014

Non league day this Saturday. A day on which people are persuaded to go and watch their local teams.

In the best of all possible worlds, Non-League Day would work something like this:
Lardy arse fat b****rd Darren normally spends his weekend fermenting on the sofa in his his replica shirt. His only friend is a Sky Remote Control he affectionately calls Stelling. Darren really is quite lonely.

Darren pays vast amounts of money every month to a chap called Rupert who lets him watch Premiership football for many, many hours every weekend. Darren has bought himself a supply of medical catheters and a leg bag. For those of you of a non-medical bent, this means Darren doesn't miss even one moment of riveting 'build up' and half-time punditry. Yes. On matchdays Darren pees into a bag.

But Darren's Mum suggests to her son that he could perhaps get out a bit more, especially at weekends. She's read in the local paper that the local non-league club ('That Place You Only Know Cos You Look It Up on Google Maps' United) is advertising free entry for their match against another town that nobody who doesn't live there has ever actually heard of. Even on an international weekend when Darren's favourite multi-millionaire stars are having a bit of a rest, he isn't at all keen on going down to 'that effing pub league place down the road' until Mum puts her foot down and tells him how she intends spending the entire Saturday afternoon watching Come Dine With Me repeats on the 42" flat screen and he can either go to see the local side or join her watching flamboyant gay men camp their way through a Passion Fruit Roulade.

So come Saturday afternoon, Darren emerges blinking and squinting into the sunlight and that thing called 'fresh air'. He's never been to a football stadium before. He's done tours of Stamford Bridge and Old Trafford on YouTube. He's spent an entire virtual afternoon at the Bernabeu. He can recite without thinking the pros and cons of every formation from 4-4-2 to 1-8-1. Gary Neville has taught him well. He can spout off the squad lists of every Premiership club. He spent the final day of the transfer window in a state of arousal rarely seen outside of a slightly seedy lap dancing club in a seaside town. But he's never been inside a football stadium.

Now this is of course a good news story with a happy ending. Darren isn't totally put off by the heady aroma of chips and Deep Heat whifting it's way around the terraces, where unlike anything he's ever seen, before people are actually standing up. There are no former players offering in-depth half-time analysis, so Darren finds himself urinating into a toilet just like other human beings. He queues up for a hot chocolate and Mars bar. In fact, he rather enjoys this.

He'a a little frightened when several of the regulars engage him in conversation about the match, and while Di Maria and Falcao are conspicuous by their absence, the centre-half postman and the winger who empties bins aren't quite the lumbering beer-bellied Jabba the Huts he was expecting from non-league football. So Darren has had, like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction - a moment of clarity. No he isn't going to burn his Wayne Rooney replica shirt. It cost seventy bloody quid FSS. And he isn't going to cancel his Sky subscription while there's still a months supply of catheter bags in that little cupboard beside the sofa.

But once or twice a season when the millionaires are taking an international break and Darren is reduced to the promise of watching Bury from the comfort of his sofa, or enduring his Mum's fetish for competitive entertaining, he may just possibly get his fat lardy arse down to that local club with the postman and the bin man and breathe a little fresh air mixed with with the heady aroma of Deep Heat, burgers and the sweet, sweet smell of real football.

Maybe.