Since I was 13 years old, I’ve spent each season obsessed by the trials and tribulations of Barnet football club. So says Adam Blenford on the BBC website and so I could say. Except it would not be true. Admittedly I started supporting them when I was thirteen, and for a couple of years there were really important to me. Adam rightly picks on the Barry Fry years and the initial promotion as very exciting times. This was just as the Premiereship started after all, it was suddenly cool to like football.
This was when I stopped going.
Do not think of me as some sort of non-league snob (and trust me, if you read the non-league paper there are plenty of them). The reasons I stopped were all very understandable.
a) I went to university. Which was 100 miles away.
b) I no longer qualified for junior tickets. And the club had ramped the price up with entrance to the Football League.
c) I could legally sit in the pub all day. And did.
Since then I have been to a few games a season, and occasionally got inspired. In the end though my support is that of many people in this country, a Sunday morning statistic hunt. It is also just another facet of me that people know and can use as a conversational gambit or take the piss. I am glad of what Barnet meant to me, those pre-pub drinking Saturday afternoons would drag when we played away. And I am pleased we have gone up this year. But not so much for me now, rather for Adam, and me fifteen years ago.
And it means I can go back to being genuinely interested in how Exeter are doing without sounding disingenuous.