The contrasting fortunes of my many “home teams”

This is my first and last attempt at sports journalism. I needed an excuse to put a crazy video of Panathanaikos fans up here!

For the first eighteen years of my life I was deprived of a good local football team to support.

Surrey, being the football black hole that it is, has a disproportionately large number of Manchester United fans. I ended up being one of them. My real local team is Woking, and they’ve just been relegated to the bowels of football known as the Blue Square South. Unless they get promoted back up to the Blue Square Premier (Vauxhall conference) they’re going to go bust.

When I left Guildford for a few months in 2005, I moved to a place where the home team made Woking look like world conquering Galacticos, Lesotho. Not having that much flat ground to play football in the Mountain Kingdom, the quality of football in Lesotho isn’t great.

We actually went to see the Lesotho national team play Botswana in Maseru and decided to walk on to the pitch at half time, shaking hands with the players and managers. Classic times. Whilst the first of my home teams was recently relegated, my second team, the “Crocodiles” (which is also a Sesotho colloquialism for “prostitute”, an unhappy name for a football team,) will not be in the 2012 World Cup held over the border in South Africa. Frankly it always was an unlikely target when tourists are allowed to walk out on to the pitch at your national stadium.

For the next four years my local team were a little known side that play in a small stadium in a neglected industrial estate. They recently won their third league title in a row and sold a little known player for the paltry sum of £80m. Yes, my local team whilst I lived in Manchester was Manchester United. And yes, there were some of us United fans in the rainy city. And yes, I have been to Old Trafford, and yes I have seen them play. Three whole times.

My third home team is doing well, but with Alex Ferguson saying he won’t buy anyone else in the transfer market having just bought a past it ageing striker who played badly for a recently relegated team and two wingers that are completely unproven at this level, you wonder what next season will bring.

My soon-to-be fourth home team have not done all that well recently, with Olympiakos becoming the big team in Greece in the last few years. Hopefully this will change, but not before I officially prove, once and for all, that I am not a glory hunter by supporting a team that is not doing particularly well.

Plus they have interesting fans.

(Update: They’re actually holding hundreds of flares up – the stadium isn’t actually burning down.)

You wouldn’t catch the Prawn Sandwich Brigade in Manchester, nor us Surrey folk at Woking, nor the mild manner Basotho in Lesotho doing this. I think I need to consider writing up a will just in case I ever end up watching them from a seat at either end of the stadium.