Last night’s game was super great until I realised that the guy getting all the goals was not playing for West Ham. Then I was very sad. So here’s an idea: every game should have two people doing the running commentary with remarkably contrasting voices, so that you know that if person A is speaking, the player is from a particular team. I plan to volunteer my services to 5 Live ASAP, since I sound remarkably different from Alan Green.

Now, one of my favourite things to do is listen to the radio. I especially like the National Public Radio programme ‘This American Life’ which is something about which I get almost as emotional as some people get about football; at least, sometimes it make me cry and then I have to lie down for a little a while until I feel better.

So in some respects I got a lot of pleasure from listening to West Ham play Liverpool on the radio, because I just generally enjoy the cadences of radio broadacsters and the way that they have to use evocative language to describe what listeners can’t see. You can also do your dishes while listening to it which is nice if (like me) simply watching a game is too boring and you would prefer to multi-task.

But on the other hand, listening to the game on the radio does presuppose that the listener knows an awful lot about football which I don’t know, resulting in making one feel a bit like she is listening to a soap opera without knowing any of the back story or established narrative arcs. They were all, ’Oh, Torres is doing such and such’ and I realised that all I really know about Torres is that he is my six-year-old cousin’s favourite player, which is really not quite enough to keep me feeling compelled.

I will not comment further on the score of Saturday’s match, but let’s just say that The Liverpool Fan and I exchanged some rather spirited text messages and if he was my boyfriend (as some readers of this blog seem to think he is – I can’t believe the insinuation that I would become a football fan to impress a man. AS IF) we would totally be broken up now. But fortunately he is not my boyfriend at all, but just my friendly downstairs neighbour, so I am able to simply retaliate by walking around my flat in stilettos a lot.

The Liverpool Fan is at a weddng today (poor excuse, methinks) and I am too shy to go watch the game at the pub on my own (scared of pub-based football-related violence), so instead I am going to try another new experience and listen to the game on the radio. This seems like it will be very boring, but what do I know?

On Saturday, West Ham is playing Liverpool, which will permit me to have an essential new football fan experience: what happens when your  beloved team is playing against the team adored by one of your best friends? Will The Liverpool Fan and I be able to watch it in the same place? Will we throw beer (or in his case, orange juice) at each other in fits of rage? Will he ever invite me over to eat delicious cake and watch Match of the Day ever again? Does it all depend on who wins? I can hardly wait.

It’s almost not worth discussing West Ham’s performance this weekend. They were beaten by Wigan. Wigan? Where the hell is Wigan? Anyway. It would almost have been enough to put me off football if not for the extent to which I found myself enjoying Match of the Day on Saturday night. Yes, I said that. I enjoyed Match of the Day. I think I like Match of the Day because it boils out all of the boring bits from football and only shows the exciting bits, including the exciting things that happen to teams that are not your team. And thus, it’s all about the narrative of football and much less about the actual endurance challenge of sitting through the game.

I also think I liked it because I was eating some delicious cake while watching.

Now, the big story on Match of the Day on Saturday was this player at Man City who used to play at Arsenal but he doesn’t any more and so then he scored a goal against Arsenal and then he ran all the way down on the field and was all, like ‘OH YEAH’ and then the Arsenal fans threw chips at him.

[Please note that the previous sentence is incoherent and run-on because I was resisting the urge to google to make it more accurate, preferring instead to demonstrate what the current extent of my football knowledge is. So, for example, I didn’t actually catch what his name was, although I noted that he had quite a good hairdo and is from Togo.]

What I find very curious about all of this is that it seems that the player - ah, now I remember, his name is Adebayor - is in big trouble for the running and ‘OH YEAH’ing and may indeed be fined or otherwise punished for ‘ridiculously over-excited goal celebration’. Because it incited a riot in the Arsenal fans. Now, as far as I can tell, it was maybe not very polite, but it is really possible for the league to legislate the amount of celebration that the players can indulge in to ensure that excitement is never ridiculous? And should there not be more onus on the fans not to throw their chips and rush the stewards and so forth? I’d think so.

I’m back from my travels, where I was briefly tempted by FC Utrecht but did not ultimately stray from my dedication to West Ham. Now that I can re-focus on my football project, I have set myself the following goals for the next month:

- Work on my statistical knowledge about the team. Apparently statistics are important. I am going to make a spreadsheet.

- Listen to a game on the radio, which I think sounds tedious but apparently is great fun.

- Start contributing to fan websites and see if I am able to pass as genuine.

- Go to Upton Park to watch a game in one of the West Ham pubs. Er, not on my own.

It’s not a city which makes following West Ham particularly easy, not just because the Tribune doesn’t cover it, but because there is no one for me to talk about football with.

But yet - there are people to talk about FOOTBALL with. My grandfather, for example, who at the age of 91 was able to tell me all about the new quarterback that the Chicago Bears have acquired this season and who is giving him high hopes for the season.

And the interesting thing is that I’m pretty sure he would also be able to tell me about the quarterback that they acquired in, say, 1983. Which is rather fascinating.

Coincidentally, earlier this week at my brother’s wedding, I discussed football with two of my male cousins. One supports Liverpool and Spain. ‘My favourite player is Torres,’ he explained. The other informed me that he backs Aberdeen and Scotland.

Their ages? Six and three. This amazes me: not only that they are able to gather information about these teams, but that they are then able to synthesize it in to opinions.