Football, for a fan, often feels like a week of torture followed by 90 minutes of hell but never more so than when your team is involved in the play-offs. This Bank Holiday weekend sees the League 2, League 1 and Championship play-off finals take place at Wembley, prompting Sir Alex Ferguson to announce that it’s “squeaky bum time” and football commentators around the country to confidently proclaim that “it all boils down to this,” where ‘this’ is a tumbling maelstrom of apprehension; a cacophony of swirling butterflies; a mind electrified, distracted, unable to hold onto any thought that does not involve ‘this’. With only two days to go, with nerves drawing closer to a Himalayan precipice, the fan is liable to search for straws ever more frantically and clutch at them ever more possessively, taking solace in the company of similarly-afflicted supporters of the same team and football’s blurred lines of fact and myth.
The statistics of a squeaky bum
