I may be a tosser, but there's still joy in that

LOCKERROOM:A little suffering, a little baring of the soul, a little penance on earth. It's good for a man, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

FIRST TENTATIVE steps back to the real world yesterday. Visited the scene. Still reeked of devastation but the chalk outlines of the Dubs, where each man had fallen, had been washed away. There were Meath people on the Hill. Seemed disrespectful, but they were singing “Come on Ye Boys in Green”. Meath were wearing yellow. Felt better somehow.

Got an e-mail during the week. A makey-up name or somebody with hilarious parents. Hard to tell. The gist of the sentiment was that there is a divine pattern in things. The pattern relates to me! Ireland winning a Grand Slam and Leinster winning a Heino were the first instalments in a godly rope-a-dope which gradually unfolded further with Leeds United’s failure to inch back towards respectability, with the Dub hurlers going pear-shaped and finally the Dub footballers being devoured like hapless wildebeest. All this happened, apparently, because I am a tosser.

(I am too. A boorish, overbearing tosser, but at least I have a correspondent with a makey-up name who keeps track of this stuff for me. I am, for instance, egotistical enough to suspend my devout atheism for a while and go along with the idea that a god, any god, would, of course, leave aside the hectic schedule of a typical day to manipulate the outcome of sports events in order to cause me suffering. That is how highly I am regarded as a potential Beelzebub both inside and outside the office.)

Except I don’t suffer that much. Now, while it is true I watch every happy day which rugby enjoys tremblingly from a darkened room, where I display the same ruined, vinegar puss that Montgomery Burns might wear while watching the citizens applaud the arrival of wind turbines on the hills above Springfield, I have an extraordinary capacity to cope with the failures of my favourites – even if they are being punished for me being a tosser.

This, for instance, is a time of year when a man like me picks up much sympathy. The Dub hurlers and footballers have generally packed up and left the stage. The English soccer season is cranking into life. People sidle up to me and say, well, what happened to the Dubs, or, are ya over that yet, or simply, hee hee hee. We discuss the Dub footballers and then have a quick post mortem on the hurlers, during which my insistence that good times are coming is treated about as seriously as the message of a man wearing a sandwich board with “The End Is Nigh” on front and back.

And then. Soccer looms. That staple of male small talk. Will United do it again this year? Benitez! Ancelotti! Wenger! Should have spent. Should never have sold. Threw the money away. Over-rated. Under-rated. Mad money for a midfielder! Twenty goals a season! Poser. Lack of pace. Won’t do it on the big day. Blah blah blah.

Don’t you know that it’s a different world down where Leeds United live! We live under the last, scraped-out barrel at the back of the last-chance saloon. And it’s not bad. Genuine excitement. A real sense that you don’t know what will happen.

As the Premiership devotes yet another year to deciding in which order the same top four finish, it’s exciting to be a Leeds fan. We still have Beckford! Two goals on Saturday! Snodgrass too. And we got €10 million for Fabian Delph which, when you are League One club, is not to be sneezed at. We have a manager who is promisingly dour and seems to know what he is at. Ken Bates is still there, but you can’t have everything.

Every big club should have a decade at least of the sort of mortification of the soul which Leeds have had and are enduring. Never making Sky Super Sunday. Not being mentioned in the sort of transfer rumours which were once dominated by Leeds, wondering if Exeter City will be decent this year. These are all small good things, reminders of what sport is really about.

And really, unless you follow the fortunes of one of the Big Four PLC’s of English soccer, you might as well follow a Leeds or a Carlisle or a Brentford, because everybody else is just bobbing up and down on the tide struggling to see where they will be when the season ends.

And there is nothing like the feeling that perhaps your guys have cracked it or are in the process of cracking it. The way Leeds finished the regular season last year, toying with us before slumping out of the play-offs. Ah. Or Dublin in this year’s Leinster final. Good times a coming, we thought. Or the days when the Dub hurlers cut loose. Our last Walsh Cup win when Marty Morris was in charge. A day in Dungarvan when Waterford were Munster champions and we opened them up.

You love those days because they are as delicious as they are unexpected.

Sport has to be like that. When I was seven, nobody came and explained to me the facts of sporting life. That you had to pick a team and stick with it through thick and thin and then through thin and thin. But those were the laws of the time and I’ve had to live with them.

It’s been a long hard year, but it really is about the journey. Here’s what I believe. Leeds are better placed than last year to get back to playing Championship football and they will do it. I believe Pat Gilroy was unlucky. Which seems like a strange thing to say about a man on the end of a 17-point defeat, but, in January when Pat started out, he never envisaged that circumstances would leave him with so many of the old guard in place come August. Dublin will start again with almost an entirely new deck. What happened to Kerry against Meath in 2001 didn’t finish Kerry football. What happened to Waterford against Kilkenny last summer didn’t finish Waterford hurling. Next summer will be fascinating.

And the Dub hurlers. The great romance will continue. Ro Fallon will return. Maybe Conal Keaney will be among us again. Ross O’Carroll will get a full summer and the wonder kids will be a year older and a year more muscular. I believe. I believe.

And all that speculation, that minefield of ifs and buts, it is more fun to be begging the gods for it to fall together than it is to be wondering about five-in-a-row of this or that. A little suffering, a little baring of the soul, a little penance on earth. So long as you aren’t a Mayo fan, that’s what following sport is about.

Or being fooled every year by the same few teams. Could be all about that too.