What a save, what now!

A very pleased Hubs who hasn't watched a single football match since we met four and a half years ago but is now an expert in football and the England World Cup team. And how to get wankered on four pints of Fosters. 

Last night I had my first experience of watching England play football booze free. I mean, I was booze free. I can’t guarantee they were. Certainly not judging by how they played in the second half…

We watched the match at a local pub where we managed to bag a table with a few friends and Hubs could sit next to me with a fucking four pint jug of lager (albeit shit lager) while I nursed ginger ale all night and was silently judged by strangers for putting Seedlip into it as though it was real gin.

Watching football sober is great because you can identify, just prior to any kind of stoppage time like half time, full time, penalty time (cheers England), when to go to the toilet at the most efficient, less queuey moment. After my first visit, I walked past queues for both the toilets that were longer than the full frontal attack of 800 football fans on the bar.

These toilet trips provided me with the full and delightful experience of the lesser spotted drunken screaming female football fan and common drunken screaming female. Both are every elbowy with loud mating calls and can be told apart by some kind of England flag type markings across the lesser spotted's face or chest.

As the second half of the game progressed, a steady stream of toilet goers snaked through the pub. They had all broken the seal and tried to reseal it with five more pints which only led to toilet breaks being required every ten minutes. Not me though. Oh no, I had to sit through the horror of the second half without even a toilet break to entertain me…

The volume of the pub gradually increased in direct correlation to the number of pints drunk. Until Colombia scored. And then, weirdly, it went very, very quiet. 30 more minutes of play after that, Hubs looking at the bar as though he was dying of thirst, pretending he didn’t have a 5.30am work start the next morning. Me, telling him he could have a soft drink. Him, jumping out of his seat like he’d been offered the secret of eternal life and running to the bar because you can’t sit in a pub without a glass to nurse. I say glass, I mean plastic-compound thing shaped like a glass.

And then the penalties. The people that can’t watch and turn their backs to the screen and then shout that they don’t know what happened. The ones that know Henderson is the worst fucking football player of all time because they played better in Sunday League in 1978. The ones who have not played football since 1994 but could now definitely score a penalty for England. The ones stood doing their physio because they don’t actually give a shit but yey, we won!

It was hard last night, sat watching football without a pint. I’ve avoided the previous games for this exact reason and because in all honesty, as you might have noticed, I’m not particularly interested in fitbaw. Whilst I’m doing extraordinarily well on my sobriety journey (48 days boi!), I know where my triggers lie and situations that have historically been soaked with booze are footballing events. Or rugby events. Or the Olympics. Or Wimbledon. Or any kind of sporting event for that matter. It doesn’t even have to have sport in it. Just an event would do.

I remember many a Euro or World Cup from the Inn on the Park to the Marine to the Lord Nelson, drinking too much, waking up in an ex-boyfriend’s bed, having to work with a hangover that would have killed a lesser human being… It’s odd to experience that sober. Football that is. I didn't wake up in an ex-boyfriend's bed. Those days are long behind me, it's all about Poets now. I’ll be honest, I was ready to walk home and go to bed at 90 minutes though Hubs realised when I went to the toilet at that point that he could sneak another pint in without consequence if he bought me my fourth ginger ale. He couldn’t, there were fucking consequences.

The celebration outside the pub when England won.

Hubs was hanging out of his arsehole this morning. Five pints was an aperitif in our old drinking days and it is telling now that his tolerance is lower as whilst he hasn’t stopped drinking, he has cut down dramatically. My favourite chant of the night was, “He got drunk on Fosters!” A chant started prior to him falling out of a takeaway.

The plus side of the whole event is that when we walked home and decided we wanted cheesy chips, I could still drive us into town to get some. And honestly, if staying sober means a never-ending ability to always have access to cheesy chips, well I’m in!