http://sportwitness.ning.com/forum/topics/fabrice-muamba-why-are-you-to-care
The chances are, you don’t know Fabrice Muamba. You know he’s a
footballer who plays for Bolton and came through the Arsenal youth
system. You know he’s been through the England youth ranks and was
highly rated, as a person and player, throughout.
That’s it. That’s all you know.
If he bumped into you in the street, picked you up and brushed you
down you’d probably be none the wiser. He’s not Cristiano Ronaldo or
Lionel Messi is he?!
So why do you care? Why do you care so much about a young man you’ve
never met? Tragic things happen to young people every day and you don’t
feel quite as sick. Yes, you’re upset by incidents, if you ever get to
hear them, but you don’t get that dreaded feeling in the pit of your
stomach which leaves your insides vacant for a moment.
Several people have pointed this out to others on Twitter. Who are
you to care? Who are you to ask people to pray and who are you to send
well wishes to someone you just don’t know.
I can’t answer any of these things. I can’t give you a valid
one-liner to fire back at the critics and I can’t make your feelings
make sense. I can simply explain mine. Well, a bit.
I was watching the game, or half-watching it. I watch many football
games a week, probably a worrying amount. Those young men kicking a ball
about upon whom we place hero status or the opposite. Hopes and fears
are invested in them. You can have a bad or good week and all that can
be turned on its head by football. The emotions supporters attach to the
game are beyond reason. It’s a release and a reason.
How often in other forms of life will you shout someone’s name in joy
(be quiet at the back you dirty minded sods) or curse them with full
genuine emotion? Even if you have great news financially or career wise,
you keep it inward – you generally play it down. High emotions and low
emotions are muted to become acceptable, you dilute feelings before you
take them to market.
Not in football. In football you do the opposite, everything means
more than it really should. A last minute goal can result in you
skipping on air for days or feeling like your eyebrows are about to hit
the desk anytime a colleague mentions it. It’s just a game. It doesn’t
make sense.
Football and the emotions of football fans are entwined beyond any
reason so any shock or contempt shown to the reactions of people to the
Fabrice Muamba situation doesn’t make sense either. How can it be
measured when football emotion isn’t measured?
It’s our game. For a lot of us it’s a huge part of our lives and when
you’re watching a game and see a young man collapse you get ‘that’
feeling. We’ve all had it at football grounds, someone goes down and you
think the worst and then seconds later they’re up again and you’re
proclaiming your hate for them. A full-on hate because they ‘put it on’.
The hate is beyond sense just as the dread was when they went to
ground.
On very rare occasions they stay down and you just know. You don’t
know why you know but you just know. It’s bad. You feel sick, you’re
nervous, you look at each other, you’re not sure what to say. When
Fabrice went down it was like that, just a football game and then not,
then it was much more than that but the emotions reserved for football
come out.
He became ours. We love the game and hate it in equal measure
sometimes and then when one of ‘ours’ goes down like that we feel it.
It’s not rational, it can’t be explained well but that doesn’t make it
invalid.
Is he? Will he? Please be alright.
You have no right to feel personal emotions about someone who you may
not have recognised last week, but you do feel them. It’s valid. It
doesn’t make sense but our feelings towards football don’t make sense.
The emotions we attach to the game don’t make sense.
And if you don’t feel these emotions with football, you’re not doing it properly.
Fabrice, it may be irrational, it may seem overblown, but we’re with you mate.
This was penned by Annie Eaves, you can follow her on Twitter at
@AnnieEaves
OUR PRAYERS ARE WITH YOU, FABRICE MUAMBA.