Well yesterday the site appeared to be having a tantrum on me and so no blog, but today the ol’ girl is back up and running and here I sit at the desk in my office at home trying to think up some inspiration. I must say kudos to the various football club social media accounts in trying to keep spirits up by showing great goals of the past, replaying great matches in full on their websites, etc. But Perhaps I’m being a bit Goldilocks because that sort of stuff just doesn’t float my boat. I’ll watch the odd goal and reminisce but my favourite part of doing that normally is when you are with people and you’re having a discussion.

Like when you’re in a pub pre match days and you’re reliving cup finals you’ve all been to together. And great goals. There’s also something about knowing the result which takes the edge off a little. It dumbs down the intensity of the feeling after the team win. Like the FA Cup final in which Ramsey scored the winning in extra time to help us win it 3-2. Watching that game again would not be as much fun because you have to sit through a pretty rugid first half, then watch Arsenal come back and yeah, it’d be nice to watch Ramsey get that goal again, but because you know it’s coming it sort of takes the ddge off it. Well, it does for me.

That’s the addictive part of football you see. It’s the raw, visceral, feeling you experience when your team does something like that. That goal Ramsey scored was a moment of elation that I hadn’t felt before and that was because I was there in the flesh for only my second FA Cup final. But first as a season ticket holder. There’s something, I dunno, ‘better’ in the fact that it was my ticket, with my money, that I paid for, whereas the other ticket I’d been given by a family friend for Southampton in Cardiff in 2003.

But the emotion I felt in that moment is impossible to replicate and those are the moments that as a football fan you live for. If you talk about football being addictive, I think it is because of those moments that the addiction is at it’s height and as a football fan the reason we always watch, or go, is because we want another hit of that drug. It’s why we pay thousands of pounds/dollars/<<insert your currency here>> to watch a collective of humans essentially running around doing things that are almost completely out of control. The logical side of a football fans brain would surely not be able to countenance going to a game otherwise. I mean when I think about my own situation in life, I am always looking for a bargain when I go shopping – like food shopping, clothes, whatever – I like the idea that I’m getting something of value for less than I should be paying for it. But when it comes to football I’m happy to take the gamble – in the shape of a season ticket, subscription to Sky TV and BT Sports, etc – and spend my money up front on something that will give me far less value than the actual value of the money I spend.

It’s because of those addictive moments we all crave. So I can totally understand why some people are going a little mad at the moment stuck at home and with no football on the horizon. We’re all addicts and we’ve been forced into remission. But not the kind where you lower the dose until you’re off the stuff completely, oh no, we’ve been given the treatment akin to being tied down to a bed in a white room and told that we have to stay there until it is completely out of our system.

Which gives me another thought; I wonder how much this will affect some people’s love of the game? Will there be some people who were obsessive but now see it as more of a hobby? Perhaps not, but there are people I know who have been big into their club but as they’ve got over the obsessive nature of going to every game and shelling out all of their cash has just waned. Does that accelerate for some people?

I think i’m of an age – and also an obsession level (I try to write a daily blog about The Arsenal for Christ’s sake) – in which i’ll probably revert straight back into my old addictive ways when the football all restarts again. Which it will by the way; we have a nation of football addicts here in the UK and I don’t think any authorities would like to see an experiment in which they go without the stuff between now and August if they voided the season. But I just wonder if there will be times where I, or other people, when that away game is on Sky TV but there’s a family occasion going on, will go to that family event rather than arrive late to that family event because Arsenal have an away FA Cup third round tie to Shrewsbury which is on TV.

What about you? How far does your football obsession go?