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Six traumatic memories from taking your child to his first football match

YOUR son’s first football match should be a wonderful bonding experience you’ll treasure forever, but instead all this shit happens: 

Parking the car

A train packed with lagered-up men in Stone Island quivering with repressed violence doesn’t seem ideal for an eight-year-old, so you drive. And an hour before a 12.30pm kick-off at Villa Park you’re in stationary traffic in bloody Handsworth looking for a suburban street where you can leave the car without it getting kicked in. Your swearing is copious.

Going to the pub

No kids allowed in the pub before the match? You’d never even noticed the absence of under 18s while savouring your pre-match pint, but apparently it’s been the case for some 20 years. Also, leaving him outside with pop and crisps unprotected from marauding rival fans ended in the early 1980s. Bollocks. You’re watching the game sober.

Seating in the upper tier

You surely can’t be that far away, given how expensive the seats were? It’s not Taylor f**king Swift, they play here 30 times a year, but it looks like you’re peering at a sodding Subbuteo game from the attic. He’s excitedly asking about his favourite players and all you can do is point vaguely and lie through your teeth, you shit parent.

Half-time refreshments

Bugger all happened in the first half, so he’s demanding a Balti pie. Keen to salvage a positive from this disaster, you agree, trek down to the concourse, queue for 20 minutes, and get fleeced for that, chips and a Coke. By the time you’re back in your seats you’ve missed a contentious VAR decision, which is the whole point of football these days.

Hate speech

Belatedly, you realise how restrained your pre-game language was. Now he’s joining in with choruses of ‘Jackie Grealish, what a wanker’, and ‘Who’s the bastard in the black?’ with remarkable gusto. You pray he’ll forget them by the time you get home, but you know that he’s carefully noted all of them for the playground in two weeks’ time.

The game was shit

Five games, 12 goals, and yours was a nil-nil. He says as you’re leaving he doesn’t want to support Aston Villa any more, dad, and can he have a Man City shirt for his birthday? You trudge a mile and a half back to your car, have an angry argument with a suburbanite, and book your wife and daughter a trip to see Villa WFC play Leicester as revenge.

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Six plausible fictitious conquests for your sexual history

TEMPTED to make your shagging record sound a bit more impressive? Here are some entirely made-up conquests you can probably get away with.

Hot woman at your hotel on holiday you never spoke to

She was German or maybe Swedish, you didn’t pay that much attention because you were too busy having sex during this whirlwind holiday romance to bother with small talk. This woman did exist on an actual holiday you went on, it’s just that your relationship was limited to occasionally seeing her in the hotel foyer. Her name? Er… Helga. Let’s hope your mates don’t remember the character from ‘Allo ‘Allo!.

Girl from the sixth-form there is a 0.000001% chance of your friends knowing

You’ve known your current group of friends for ages, but not long enough for them to be familiar with your sixth-form days. And so they won’t be able to disprove the existence of Rachel, who you had many red hot youthful sexual experiences with during A-levels. Was she fit, your mates ask? Quite pretty, you say, for a cunning note of authenticity.

The university girlfriend(s)

Hardly anyone goes to uni with their mates, except rich kids who all seem to mysteriously know each other. This gives you carte blanche to invent one or more fictional girlfriends. But beware of a friend whipping out his phone and going: ‘Bet she’s on Facebook!’ Luckily there’s a simple solution to this: simply say her name is Emma Smith, or Kate Jones, or similar. Even the sad bastards who constitute your best mates aren’t pathetic enough to scroll through 200 tedious Facebook entries.

The temp in the office of your first job who moved back to Australia

Your friends hopefully won’t find it unusual that you never mentioned this stunning woman before, despite you generally being quite forthcoming about past relationships. Anyway, ‘Caroline’ moved back to Perth after a year in the UK, which is a thing Australians do so that bit is true at least. Moving back to Oz is a nice touch. You can sound slightly wistful and get sympathy for being a sensitive type reflecting on what might have been. Also it is f**king impossible to check.

A married woman

Obviously you kept this quiet at the time because it was an extramarital affair. And it’s unlikely your friends will badger you over an awkward, grown-up infidelity situation. Except Gavin, who will ask if you’ve got a picture of her tits. Obviously shagging someone who’s married with kids puts you in dubious moral territory if everything comes crashing down, but since it’s a pathetic lie you’re in the clear.

The gorgeous one in a made-up pop band

Really get an ego boost by claiming you’ve had sex with a Z-list celeb. Music history is littered with forgotten manufactured pop acts, so make up a member of one you’ve shagged. The trick here is to make your friends feel as though they should know who she is. Exasperatedly say: ‘Oh come on, you must remember Kim from All*Ure!’ Obviously they didn’t follow the dregs of the 90s girlband scene, so Kim will sound real. And since your friends have never met anyone famous this gains you the same male kudos as having shagged all of Girls Aloud.

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