Shafqat's 7 Segment Cricket Fan Spectrum

Over at Dawn.com, Saad Shafqat has penned a ripper piece entitled "The seven stages of a Pakistan cricket fan". I've taken the liberty of New Zealandising his treatise but make sure you have a squizz at his original piece. The guts of it is that the personalities of cricket supporters are divided into seven segments - although there are really eight.

In the context of the Pakistan team, the highs are probably much higher than what we have experienced here in New Zealand for a while, but like the men in green our New Zealand team can lurch between being brilliant and wretched in the space of a day or two.

The first group identified are the fair-weathers. These are the semi-interested fans who only turn up when the team is winning, or playing Twenty20 on a sunny day and their mate at work has a couple of free tickets and a parking pass.

Then there are the diehards who display "steadfast devotion" and refuse to be disappointed even where New Zealand is destroyed out of nowhere by a rampant Monty Panesar and meaning the glint of a rare Test victory on English soil evaporated into a comprehensive loss. The diehards don't tut-tut when the national side succumbs to Bangladesh in a one-dayer or gets flogged to all parts by the Scottish top order. They manage to wring out a drop or two of optimism from any conceivable situation - but as Shafqat puts it: "People often mistake diehards for optimists, but they are not the same. The optimist merely hopes for good times; the diehard believes it."

There are theorists, defined as "emotionally detached analysts with a deep understanding of the game". These are the people who are normally looking after the scorecard, and may be sporting some sort of rat's tail haircut even if they are over 60 years old. They have a cold devotion to statistics and have little care for the beauty of the game, breaking everything down into numbers and facts. They look back at hard data, and are the ones who sit on the fence when you ask them who to put your $50 on as top scorer for NZ in the next Test. They don't care about your opinion either. (For the record, I would opt for Taylor or Ryder given the recent form line is something like this: Taylor, Taylor, Ryder, McCullum, Vettori, Ryder, McIntosh, McIntosh, Flynn, McCullum, Redmond, Ryder, Taylor, Taylor, Ryder, Vettori, Redmond, How, McCullum.)

Obsessives are closely related to theorists, but can normally be distinguished because they are wearing an anorak either over the top of or underneath their regular everyday normal clothes. They have crossed the line between a healthy detachment and headed to the fetish and infatuation end of the scale. If your cricket passwords are Martin Crowe's Test run aggregate, you get snarky about people who leave out the apostrophe between the "d" and the "s" in Lord's, schedule all your annual leave around cricket fixtures, foam at the mouth when you find out which hotel the visiting international team is staying in when they are in your hometown, or you talk about "letting that one go through to the keeper" a lot at work then you are probably in this segment.

Cheerleaders wear official Black Cap merchandise with pride, and have no shame in yelling out mindless slogans of support to the New Zealand players regardless of venue: at the ground, at the pub, at their boyfriend's Mum's place. They are relentlessly optimistic, until they realise the match is lost then they take the loss hard. If a win emerges, they are the unbearable ones who walk the streets chanting about how good New Zealand is at cricket, despite warnings from nearby theorists that it was our first victory in three months.

In contrast, romantics are the ones quietly reclined on the bank, content to let the pleasure "wash over as something that just happened on the field evokes sepia-toned memories of bygone glories". They want New Zealand to win, but it is enough to see the Kiwis getting thumped by masters of the game as Gayle or Ponting or Murali. They nod knowingly when Ewen Chatfield walks past in his Corporate Cabs attire, and even recognise some of the old-timers and former cricketers and fish-heads up in the stand wearing VIP passes and suits, and holding walking sticks and cups of tea.

The sceptics and the malcontents are closely related - they pretty much hate the team, their ticker, the selectors, their training methods, the coach, the captain, the structure of the season, the colour of the shirts, the haircuts, the support staff. The distinction is that while "the sceptic is difficult to please, the malcontent is impossible to please". So the criticism would be flowing for an ugly century at Eden Park, a win by 100 runs would be slammed as it should have come easier than that, and Hadlee would be regarded as a good bowler who would have done a lot better if he had never shortened his runup.

Where do you sit on the Shafqat supporters' spectrum as of today? I think many of us move from one category to another depending on who we are watching the game with, how emotionally involved we are in a particular contest, the warmth of the beer in hand, and what side of bed we got out of. I can recognise different aspects of my own cricket-viewing tendencies in many of the segments, but I know the one I try to avoid the company of most is the malcontent. Where sit you?

***

In Episode 99 of The BYC: The Beige Brigade podcast we line up for the 99th time and talk of nuns in Leeds, an outstanding array of Emos from around the world, Ashes trivia, the fake tan-off between Warne and Botham, the Woman Slayer corpses in his GNR tribute, and the ECB and FLOM are nominated for the Exchange4Free Sellout of the Week...RSS feed is here or visit The BYC page on iTunes. If you are on Twitter, follow us in sporadic 140-word bursts by heading here.