I won’t tell you that no one at all leaves their seat for 45 minutes straight but the amount of up and down is dramatically less than the average American sport.
After all, one cannot properly join the chorus of Oriol Romeu’s terrace song from in front of a stainless steel trough in the men’s room, and there’s nothing in the world worse than missing the ball hit the back of the net from a header after a corner, a volley from the edge of the box, a well-earned penalty.
Ori-oriol
ori-oriol
oriol Romeu
ori-oriol
ori-oriol
oriol Romeu
ori-oriol
ori-oriol
oriol Romeu!
There are 15 minutes between halves and most football supporters spend that brief interval shuffling their cold feet in a queue to pee before joining another, longer queue that will ultimately culminate with the handing over of a few quid for a beer and a pie.
We wish for a goal, we sing in unison, we pee, we scarf down a pie.
It’s a simple life.
I’m a devotee of the classic sausage roll and waited for exactly 22 minutes at St. Mary’s for one, HT + 7′ of 2nd half, but when I finally reached Noah, the beleaguered concession worker responsible for the football-watching catastrophe and living proof I always pick the wrong line, the sausage rolls were gone as were the pies — all varieties, gone! — leaving only the blandest forearm-length hot dogs the south coast of England, nay the world, has ever known.
I plunked down by £3.70 and did a piss-poor job pretending it was a tender warm sausage wrapped in flaky pastry as I watched my Saints cling to and then eventually relinquish their slender 1-0 advantage to a late Arsenal goal from the meaty French forehead of Olivier Giroud.
Goddammit I wanted a sausage roll and a Saints win during my first visit to St. Mary’s.
