Red Army

I support Manchester United and it's brilliant. We always win, and we get to wear the colour red. Everyone knows that the red car always finishes first. Most football supporters hate United, mainly because we beat their team and they'll always come up with a lot of sore-loser excuses to explain for this - up until last season it was "Ronaldo does all the work" which loosely translates into them being jealous because we've got better players. However - I'm not a very good football supporter. I genuinely love it when my team win and I've followed them since I can remember, and so has my dad; they play fantastic, entertaining football and the tickets, in context, are cheap. But I haven't been to a single game this season and I only watch football on the telly if it's United. I know people that will watch any team, any time, purely for the joy of the sport, yet for some reason I just can't find it interesting if I don't want any single team to win.

I don't want the English international team to win in the slightest either. Partly because I don't want Peter Crouch to smile but partly because I find it hard to turn off the part of my brain that generates hatred for the other team-players (i.e. Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard), so I only want 1/3 of the team to win. Aren't I the little mercenary. When you add in the fact that they only ever seem to play versus Croatia or Ukraine - instead of say, France or Brazil or USA (those teams, I want to see beaten!), I don't even want to see it on the television. England are boring.

The final thing that makes me a rubbish supporter is that when I'm at Old Trafford for the live games, I can't ignore the fact that I'm standing in a crowd consisting mainly of middle-aged, slightly inebriated and badly dressed men shouting at 22 young, sweaty, part-time male models running about in silly clothes after an expensive golf ball. The atmosphere in the Stretford End, however electrifying when United score, is far too similar to the atmosphere in the Poll Tax riots, or a domestic abuse incident. Most of the guys come every week to escape their nagging wives and let off some steam - and in the olden days, this energy would have been expended by beating their children or brawling in the street, so obviously club football plays a fundamental peacekeeping role in modern British society. But I'm not locked into a stagnant marriage or up to my eyeballs in mortgage payments - I'm 17. And as an optimistic, bright, enlightened student, I just can't find it in me to shout at an athlete for running too slow, when I know very well that Nemanja Vidic might hunt me down and stamp on my face and I wouldn't be beautiful anymore. Those studs are lethal, I'll have you know.

Maybe I'm just not masculine enough. I should go and man-up. I could embark on an overambitious DIY project or pay too much for a corporate paintballing trip or even go for a nice, relaxing shopping-mall shooting spree. Those are definately blokey activities. Come to think about it, men are rubbish! We can't multitask, we injure, maim and kill, we care more about the movements of little green bits of paper more than the meaning of life, the universe and everything - and we're nowhere near as pretty as girls. And to top it all, they are much cleaner than us.