To boo or not to boo?

You are a fan of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Many people in London are, including friends and colleagues of mine. You have a season ticket that probably costs you between a grand and fifteen hundred pounds. You have been a season ticket holder for twenty, thirty, forty years. You have seen three home Premiership wins in the last thirteen months in your expensive and beautiful new stadium, wins against Manchester United (finished fifteenth last season), Southampton (relegated) and Burnley (who might end up being relegated.) Last weekend, your team was thumped four-one at deadly rivals Arsenal. Three of the four were scored by a player you had tried and failed to buy. You might not like xG (“expected goals”) as a measurement of anything, but your xG against Arsenal was the lowest of any team in any game in the league this season. The second lowest was also your team, in a game against Chelsea. Two of your biggest games of the season, and there was nothing to get excited about. (Not literally nothing. If you add the expected goals together, there was 0.17 excitement, or just under one fifth of one goal’s worth of excitement.)

Tonight you have a game against Fulham, fifteenth in the table. Surely you can’t lose at home to them too? Yet after four minutes you are a goal down, a slightly unlucky deflected shot. And then two minutes later your goalkeeper, inexplicably, races out towards the corner flag and presents the ball to a Fulham player. Fulham score again. You are losing two nil at home to Fulham with six minutes on the clock, after one home win all season, back in August. And YOU LOSE YOUR SHIT. You start to boo, loudly. Lots of other fans are booing too. Of course you lose your shit. Every real sports fan in the world who has endured what you have had to endure would boo.