CHENNAI : I have been a fan of the Arsenal Football Club for a little over ten years now. The London football club caught my eye when I had to succumb to peer pressure and resort to remote football hooliganism when my adolescent classmates dictated so; what began as an attempt at fitting in, soon turned into an obsession. I even paid an exorbitant fee last year to take a tour of the Emirates stadium (Arsenal’s home turf) and commemorate my fandom tenure.
Having indulged in activities that count as an expression of support for the club, I still wonder why I am obsessed with a club that has nothing to do with my culture or my bringing? Is it the love for Arsenal’s football? Or is it just human tendency to migrate to groups that support your cause?
Drawing parallels to my obsession with a team that’s far away and one that I have no real connection to, the fan culture around the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) has continued to baffle me — what really roots a sports team to a certain geographical location? Is it just in the name, or is it thriving in home talent, or just about where the team was formed?
The Chennai Super Kings is a franchise cricket team based in Chennai and plays its home matches in the MA Chidambaram Stadium (Chepauk) and the owners of the team at this point seem quite murky.
Despite the ethical conundrums that have surrounded the team over the last few years, we still continue to support the club; one that questions sportsmanship and turns the moral compass way off target. But a sports team isn’t really about a bunch of fifty-somethings sitting around a table making “executive” decisions; it’s about its players, the human beings putting the limits of athleticism and evolution to tests, every single day. The players are the faces of a city that has continued to exhibit support and loyalty despite the team having been suspended.
But none of them answer my questions — why do residents of the city still thrive to stadiums, buy tickets at exorbitant prices, continue mocking every other team in the league, and more recently, shun protests that have a greater connection to their existence than any particular sporting team?I still haven’t managed to answer the dichotomy that’s been splitting the city and state apart — what’s more important, a cricket team or protests that have been fighting to get the attention of the national media? Maybe my question is wrong. Maybe it isn’t one or the other. Maybe you can support your team that you have no real connection to and still protest for causes that your state has been fighting for.
What still baffles me about the CSK fandom is how fans of the club, or at least in my echo chamber were kind enough to give themselves a day off and decide for the rest of the world that what mattered when CSK were playing their first home game was only CSK and the protests could take a day off or even wait.
Maybe that’s a question I’ll be able to answer when I find a rationale to my obsession with Arsenal.