Tiemoue Bakayoko and the anguish of a Chelsea football fan
By Siva Sankar
Chelsea fans continue to wait for a transfer they have been so desperately craving. Will Tiemoue Bakayoko ever arrive? Or will the pain continue?
Our protagonist stood abruptly, knocking his chair over. His fists were clenched and his visage was red in an effort to restrain himself from causing his keyboard to sail across the room and into the wall. Then our hero shook it off, reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes, took one out and lit it up.
This was a regular occurrence these days for him. The technical term for this phenomenon is rage quitting. Many a keyboard and a controller has been the victim of this irrational violent impulse. What could cause a normal human being to act with such malice towards lifeless electronic equipment?
Ask a gamer and he’ll tell you that everyone suffers from this affliction at some point. It was there that this event had first been noticed. Many would blame this on the falling prices of electronic paraphernalia. If a thing is not valuable then it is easily replaceable. But surely it can’t be that simplistic. It couldn’t explain the primal rage, the steam coming out of one’s ears, the destructive impulse.
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It also doesn’t explain the spreading of this phenomenon into another passionate demographic – football fans. The symptoms are there. Multiple #Announce tweets are where it begins and it culminates in a violent rant tearing into the thing that they love the most, their beloved football club. How can a normal human being act so irrationally?
If you delve deeper under the surface, it becomes obvious that the world itself is the reason. Our computer screens and our mobile tablets provide a window to the world we want to see. Twitter, Instagram and other social media feed our appetite with things we want to hear and see. But a slight disruption to the palatability of this can cause violent outbursts.
Our protagonist used to be a calm and rational guy too. He always took things with equanimity. But these days, his love for his club had taken a darker turn into obsession. Our protagonist, being an observant person, noted that this happened during transfer windows. In pursuit of truth, our protagonist had gone to extreme lengths. He had created an algorithm to sift through the tens of thousands of words written about any given transfer and to estimate likelihood. It had helped him somewhat in previous windows.
But the past few transfer seasons were illogical. Transfers that all logic dictated should have happened were falling apart. Not to mention those crazy transfer fees! All that is enough to cause anguish but our protagonist, being a Chelsea fan, seemed to go through a special kind of hell. He had noticed that Chelsea were linked to twice as many players as other clubs and that only half of them were even partially true.
So what had caused this particular outburst? The past week had been tough on the protagonist. His algorithm had told him that the Romelu Lukaku return was highly possible. He had gotten his hopes up. The romance of a second coming story never gets old.
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But at the last minute, his dreams had been ground to dust. His coping mechanism had failed him and now he was beginning to doubt whether the other near-sure transfer according to his algorithm would happen. The reported transfer of Monaco player Bakayoko.
His medical had been pending for nearly a month but there still didn’t seem to be any movement. But now various whispers about the transfer were coming up. Some claiming that a serious knee problem was holding it up, others claiming that it was just a minor injury which had been cleared up.
Still, others were stoking his paranoid fears that former friend turned enemy Jose Mourinho was doing his best to make United look like a Chelsea team in red.
Our protagonist, driven by desperation, had resorted to reading social media for portents. He had painstakingly gathered evidence from Instagram posts and after some amateur detective work concluded that Bakayoko was in London. But just moments ago a tweet from Bakayoko’s account geotagged him in Paris. If that weren’t troubling enough, the contents of the tweet were trollish at best and disastrous at worst.
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What can our hero do in these times? From where will his salvation come? He hopes against hope that the Chelsea board will take pity on his innocent electronic equipment. But as cliched as it is, it’s the hope that kills you.