Gary Johnson has complained about people leaving games early, and I can only echo his words. Yes, he's the Bristol City manager, and you can stop pretending you didn't know. Bristol sports updates? From Bourneville to Frankfurt to Indiana, you're all gagging for them.
Most home games, people start to leave the ground with about ten minutes left. By the ninety minute mark this has become a torrent of people all rushing to beat the rush and fighting through each other to do it. The irony of this seems to escape them. Injury time is played out with hordes of people along the edge of the touchline, and corners and throwins have to be taken at their convenience. Where we sit, any action near the corner flag is hidden from view.
Me and Dave, meanwhile, wait until the crowd has mostly cleared, then stroll out with ease. We do this with fingers stuck in our ears so we don't hear the announcer (I want to say compère, but that doesn't seem quite right) read out the full time scores from the Premiership, because that way we can watch Match of the Day without knowing them in advance. I've battled all my life to get my friends to accept that not wanting to know scores is an entirely reasonable attitude rather than just another weird Asberger's behaviourism they can taunt me with in the pub, so it's nice that in one place at least people instinctively understand and sympathise.
We're rarely more than ten minutes behind the premature evacuators. City aren't a big club. It's not like we're at Old Trafford, with seventy thousand fans all trying to get back to Harrogate and Slough. Most fans walk home. There is some traffic, but that's mainly the away fans who are heading in the opposite direction. And you have to wonder, if fans are so casual about the game they're prepared to miss any potential last-minute drama, why are they prepared to pay £28 a ticket? I just don't understand it.
It particularly annoyed Johnson at the Middlesbrough game, because City were a goal down and really needed a lift from the crowd to try and grab an equaliser. Footballers are performers, and can't be expected to work without an audience. Imagine if half the audience started filing out just as Hamlet was starting his death speech. Oh, I die, Horatio ... oi, come back, I'm still here, not all the rest is silence you know. Oh Horatio, surely you could have waited, or at least got me one in ...
Incidentally, apologies to anyone who wanted to watch the Hamlet highlights without knowing the final score. Surely you could see which way it was going, though.