During the boxing day clash with Tottenham hotspur, I am sad to say that I was ashamed to be a Villa fan at one point—not because of events on the pitch or the score line, but because of the behaviour of some, fans is not the word I am looking for, let’s say the behaviour of some who attended the game.

After Gareth Bale scored his second and Tottenham’s third with around 15 minutes still to play, there was a mass exodus from the ground, literally half of Villa Park emptied in a matter of minutes. I understand why people left if I am honest; there was not much to hang around for and with it being Boxing Day, public transport was limited, so leaving when they did is justified for me. Of course not everyone was leaving for transport reasons, others just wanted to be first to the bar in an attempt to bring some Christmas cheer back into their life whilst drowning their sorrows at the same time—again just as good a reason to leave early in my opinion.

The reason behind this piece, as I said in the header, is my shame at the actions and behaviour of some Villa fans towards other Villa fans that left early. Like I said, the exodus started in around the 75th minute, causing one section of the crowd to my left to stand up and start jeering the absconders. ‘’You are not welcome at Villa Park’’ was the cry and ‘’see you at Wembley’’ was the chant—insinuating that these fans who were leaving are fickle and would only pop up again when we reach a cup final or another ‘big game’. The stream of people leaving continued and as they did, the insults kept on coming, until one very, very muscular-looking bloke—who had only been to the toilet—returned and stood facing the section of ‘’fans’’ who moments earlier had hurled abuse at him, unsure who the culprits were, as all eight of them sat in silence when confronted. The hulk returned to his seat.

We are now at the point where Spurs score their fourth and more people are leaving, which is the norm with around five minutes to go even if we are winning, but the Neanderthals continued abusing those deciding to leave. They directed their abuse at two young lads, no older than 17, calling them fickle and fair-weather fans.

Needless to say, these youngsters didn’t take kindly to being called fickle: Christmas spirit was definitely not in the air. Personal insults were exchanged leading to threats being made; at this point, more people were watching the show than the game. The older group certainly did not act their age—they were all easily into their late 30s, and there was around eight or nine of them—hardly a fair fight. But the youngsters, to their credit, walked away to the jeers and threats of “I know where you sit…I will open you up like a tin of beans,” etc., etc. This left the primates to thoroughly enjoy their chest-beating moment.

After this incident, I enjoyed the last five minutes of the game as an almost carnival-like atmosphere took over, to the chant of ‘’Paul Lambert’s claret and blue army,’’ which seemed to go on forever—to the point where any lull was welcomed because my hands were red raw from clapping. The chanting also went some way to helping me block out, momentarily, the pain that Tottenham, and Gareth Bale in particular, had inflicted on us. ‘’Why can’t we do this from kick off?” I thought. It was one of those moments, and the unity amongst the few remaining fans restored some pride.

What I am getting at in this piece is not only the fact that the actions of a few made the loss to Spurs even harder to swallow, but that if we put as much effort into supporting the team as we do into bickering and arguing with each other, Villa Park would once again be a cauldron of noise.

We tend to pigeonhole each other as supporters: positives, negatives, fickle, delusional. Can’t we all just fall under the same umbrella and support our team? I get that we all have opinions and where there are opinions there will be debate—which is good, as we all have diverse views on our club.

The point I am trying to make, though, is the divide amongst fans is cancerous. Cancer spreads and when it does we end up with a disjointed set of fans with splinter cells or factions instead of one unit all pushing in the same direction, all sharing a common goal, and most importantly, getting behind our young team.

Other clubs around the country and some closer to home label us fickle. That’s fair enough, I can accept that.

But we need to stop doing it to each other—some will be upbeat, some will be downbeat after games like Chelsea for example. We are all different. But what we have to remember is that we are all Villa fans at the end of the day and for the team to progress, we need to all pull together and not be at each others’ throats because we disagree on certain things. We have some of the best support in the country and it’s time to show it—not only to the rest of the league, each other, and our manager, but most important of all, our young team.

So are you a positive, a negative—or are you a fan? Because that’s what we need right now.

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