Football fans are, as Sean Ingle famously observed on these pages in 2005, idiots. They are also a miserably deluded shower. Everyone thinks their team has the hardest core/nawtiest firm/coolest casuals/strongest values/most loyal support. It's the adult version of "my dad's bigger than your dad"; it's also an embarrassment and, almost inevitably, inaccurate.
The Proper Football Fan has so many commandments, and all of them are consistently broken by supporters of all clubs. One of the most important – "you never, ever boo your own," the equivalent of swearing at your mother – went west last night at Upton Park, where Alan Curbishley was given the bird and informed, in a manner of speaking, that "you'll be the recipient of a nice shiny new P45 come sunrise".
They were wrong, but only in the detail. They will get their wish sooner rather than later, and at some level of consciousness all involved parties know it. The presumed availability of the fans' darling Slaven Bilic (who wouldn't want to give up managing their country to take over a mid-table side with no money?) only weakens Curbishley's position further.
As well as being obviously counter-productive, booing your own team shows an utter lack of class and cool. But this mob rule is increasingly prevalent in football and, while the Proper Fan tries to blame it on the admittedly lamentable post-Italia 90 brigade of supporter, it is clearly not as simple as that. Let he who has never tasted a prawn sandwich cast the first stone.
That Curbishley is under such pressure is a reflection of a game that has lost all perspective. Curbishley, after all, is a man who has won two of his three games this season (and whose side were drawing 0-0 when they were reduced to 10 men), having finished in the top half last season. In short, he has done OK: 6/10 maybe. Factor in an injury list that verges on the macabre and a significant reduction in the funding promised when he took over and it's nearer 7/10.
In the past you had to be on the useless side of mediocre to get the sack. English people laughed at how those crazy Italians turned over managers like a lothario does partners. You can get sacked – sorry, you can agree to leave by mutual consent – for anything these days. On occasion it can be justified, if there is an upgrade as obvious as Juande Ramos for Martin Jol or a manager as palpably out of his element as Sammy Lee, but for the most part it is the product of English football's increasingly ruinous obsession with the grass on the other side.
Clearly there are issues at West Ham, particularly with the frigid football favoured by Curbishley and his decision to sign so many injury-prone players on huge wages. That is fair enough – English football clubs are like the inhabitants of Twin Peaks, with secrets and lies lurking behind each door - but if you start sacking managers who are achieving acceptable returns purely on aesthetic grounds, Pandora's Box will be well and truly open.
Ultimately, however, it seems at West Ham that the biggest issue is with Curbishley himself. Equilibrium does not sit well with a fanbase that is predisposed towards melodrama, and the fact that the club spent almost the entire second half of last season marooned in 10th place reinforced the existing perception of Curbishley as a human tranquiliser. He is everything West Ham fans aren't – undemonstrative, equable, impassive – and, as with Sam Allardyce at Newcastle, they never warmed to him from the start. When he miraculously averted relegation in 2006-07, 99.99% of the praise went to Carlos Tevez.
This is not to say Curbishley is the right man for West Ham. From afar, it is impossible to know. But he certainly deserves a chance to have a full season with something resembling his best XI on the field and to build on what, for all the tedium, was a very solid first full season in the circumstances.
He may not give you the fantasy but he will supply a comfort, and the little things that you only appreciate in hindsight: security, beating Manchester United three times in a row, beating Liverpool. West Ham fans should be careful what they wish for: the last time they went chasing the fantasy, after a series of perfectly adequate mid-table finishes around the turn of the century, they played a part in the removal of the incumbent Harry Redknapp and got a new manager, Glenn Roeder.
