As I try to let this blog take off, I realise how I struggle to encapsulate a truly impartial view of the sport. As an Arsenal fan, I am used to defending my club against the relentless onslaughts of friends, family, and even teachers. Perhaps this is a flaw in my work, I don’t know, but I highly doubt I will be able to banish it from my ethos anytime soon.

So I have decided that I want to explore fully the characteristics of my opinion, and how I’m going to express them. I’d like to disclose this so that I don’t get accused of being in denial of my bias – I have completely accepted this, and I am afraid that you will have to as well.

I imagine my position as a Gooner would not go down well with some divisions of the fan base, especially in the dark corners of AFTV. I support the club 100%, but I am highly critical of it, and in no way to I try to deny that we are stuck in a rancid quagmire of mediocrity. And, I do admire Tottenham Hotspur in certain ways. Not as a club, but as individual players. I do believe that Harry Kane, Christian Eriksen and Heung-Min Son are truly world class, especially Son. Say what you like about the histories of the clubs from a trophy-winning point of view, but they’ve been doing a hell of a lot better than we have in recent years, despite a recent dip in form.

I don’t think supporting a club should consist of bad-mouthing others at all. First of all, I believe that it just shows that something is wrong with the club of the person doing the bad-mouthing, or else there would be no need to care what others do. Although I am not a Liverpool fan myself, I can’t imagine that their fans have much to talk about other than the superiority of their own team (although they did that anyway, even when it very obviously wasn’t true).

I also despise the thought of supporting a football club being anything other than an enjoyable experience. It sounds ironic coming from an Arsenal fan, I know, but over the last few months I have learned to treat defeats with indifference, and enjoy the small scraps of victory whenever we manage to scavenge them, like hyenas. Actually I like the metaphor of the hyena, because now we can only laugh hysterically in our despair as a club.

So that’s how I support my club. Now on to the more fun part – how I play. I love watching football, and indeed, writing about it (in spite of what the regularity of my posts may suggest). But above all of those in terms of enjoyment comes the sheer ecstasy felt when playing. I think I’ve probably made this clear already in my Ode to Sunday League – if you haven’t read it yet, please do after this – but I want to cement it here. Also, just so you don’t get any ideas, I don’t play for an academy, just for a bog standard Sunday League youth team. This means that I have learned not to care about winning games, which is fortunate, because last season our average scoreline was probably about 10-1 in favour of the opposition.

I’ve moved beyond the superficiality of only caring about results, because in the end it doesn’t matter. I’d much rather be on the losing side of a nine goal thriller than struggle to stay awake in a 0-0 draw. Of course, I always try to play my best for the team, and I try to score goals and make incisive passes, which sometimes I do, but more often chances go spectacularly to waste, £2 footballs smashed viciously into the trees behind the goal, never to be seen again. And this is funny. There’s nothing else to it. It gives you a laugh with your teammates, sometimes even your rivals. I remember playing up front in a game which we lost 19-2, and given my role of staying on the last man on the halfway line, I shared friendly banter with the opposition’s centre-halves, bonding over the hopelessness of our organisational skills.

But I loved last season. I was surrounded with wonderful people, and some genuinely excellent players. But the talent is less important than the spirit of the team. Although sometimes we found ourselves feeling down after a drubbing, we always picked ourselves up and went out again, always giving our all.

Considering these times as I write, I realise that they transcend football as a sport altogether. It’s taught me how to create rapport with people in a relaxed way, how to handle failure, repeatedly, and from this, most importantly, it has instilled within me a graft which I hope will stay with me for the rest of my life. I could so easily have allowed myself to get angry while playing, resenting the other team, my friends, even myself. But instead I’ve learned to remain calm and centred, live in the moment, consider the situation. and instead of thinking about it like, “I’m standing here in the pouring rain, being hammered,” I think, “I’m out here, yes in the pouring rain, but I’m here with my friends, playing the sport I love, and to hell with the result, I’m having fun.”

And that’s why, like Patrice Evra, I love this game. In some ways it is just a bunch of people kicking a ball around, but it’s the people that make it what it is. As the great Terry Pratchett put it in such perfect eloquence, “The thing about football – the important thing about football – is that it is not just about football.”