A happy atmosphere

I haven't been this happy since an incident with a gallon of farm-made cider in Brockwell Park last summer. Everton came to Craven Cottage, were confronted by 20,000 mad cardboard clapping machines and eleven footballers, and got beaten.

These cardboard clappers deserve further consideration.  Football is full of stupid atmosphere generating gimmicks. I remember last year at Middlesbrough the whole thing reached meltdown. At the time we had a song for Papa Bouba Diop that went "doop doop de doop, Papa Bouba". Well, as chance would have it, Middlesbrough used the same tune for their goal music. So three times they scored against us, and three times the Fulham end stood up and danced. It was quite strange. They may have wondered what we were doing. We were safe, we didn't care. Everyone had booked those tickets thinking it'd be a do or die game, but we beat Liverpool the week before and so the Boro match was a dead rubber. So dancing to the opponents' goal music seemed about par for the course. Why not?

Cardboard clappers are more acceptable than I'd thought (a lot of people seem to have been won over, despite initial reservations), but I really can't support goal music. Really, what's wrong with a good old fashioned roar? Are the roars not loud enough anymore? At Fulham we seem to have Blur's "Song 2" now ("woooohooo!"), which is fine but really not necessary. What's it trying to do? Appeal to the kids? Make us dance?

I don't know. But those cardboard clappers are good. They're little concertina things with our sponsor's message all over them. When the teams come out some people hold them up to create a sea of white (white washing machine pictures, but let's not be cynical), then when they're out and lined up the trick is to just whack them against your hand. It creates a pleasing "thwack" noise, which, when done by everyone in the ground, must be quite off-putting to everyone whose job it is to play football that day.

And by irritating all the players presumably we level the playing field in some way. That must be the theory. Everton have been great away this year. We beat them. It must be the sound of cardboard that did it.

You'll note that no remarks have been made about staying up or going down. Who knows? We're back in it now. We have to play all the other bad teams. We have half a chance.