Not deja vu

Bristol City 0 - 3 Ipswich Town
Chopra 13, 60
Martin 51

It hit me as we were walking out at the end. I was talking to Dave and Brendan about the farce we'd just witnessed, trying to find the bright side. Oh well, at least the Ipswich fans will go home happy. Suddenly it all felt so familiar.

We exit the Dolman Stand and pass between the burger stand and the ticket office. I say something hopeful. There is a moment's silence while the full scale of the cognitive dissonance between my sunny-side-of-the-street rhetoric and the grim reality of the situation strikes home. One of my companions points out the futility of hope and the inevitability of crushing despair, the other implies that if he'd been minded to try anything so patently crass as to raise the tone he'd have done a much better job than I had. We walk across the asphalt exit and turn right up Ashton Road. Walking as ever on the shadowy side. With the houses on one side and the trees on the other, there is no sunny side.

It was almost as if it had happened before. Which of course it had.

So it isn't deja vu. It's only deja vu if the sense of familiarity an event inspires is an illusion. This was more like the nightmare Nietzschean vision of eternal recurrence.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, our hero is tortured by the idea that our lives repeat themselves over and over again, and that every painful step of his philosophical journey will be endlessly recapitulated.Viewed through this lens, being a Bristol City fan becomes an epic Secret Army-like trudge along an infinitely long Ashton Road, seeking an infinite number of excuses for an infinitely poor performance, after losing infinity nil at home again.

Zarathustra resolves his crisis through saying yes to life, boldly crying that the joys of the philosophical life are such that they more than outweigh the sufferings, even if those sufferings are endlessly repeated. Under the circumstances, how could I say any less?

For I can look forward to an infinite number of Steve Brooker last minute headers against Norwich, see Neil Warnock's playoff disappointment at our hands on permanent replay, and savour the eternal spotless now of our post-promotion 2007 pitch invasion. If you want footballing immortality you have to take the rough with the smooth.

Or so I wrote ten days ago. Then I left off posting it until the country stopped being on fire, and since then City have lost again, 3-1 at Cardiff, and prop up the division with one goal scored to six conceded. My second team, Leeds, have also lost their first two games, and are second from bottom, while my home town team, Coventry, are third from bottom, also on zero points. I calculated the odds on my three favourite teams lining up as the bottom three, in descending order of favouriteness. It's 1 in 12,144. Even by my limited expectations, this can hardly be described as a good start. If Zarathustra had been a City fan, he'd have gone back into his cage and slit his wrists.

So fuck Nietzsche. And fuck this shit. Football is now officially stupid. So there.