Cheers JJ.I meant Ardiles response :-)
"Oxblogger
Enjoyed reading that. I thought it was a thoughtful and humorous blog. But it wasn't without its contradictions.
The first, and most obvious, of the contradictions is the one pointed out above by Newbury Robin. The very existence of this blog entry is testament to the fact that you
are irritated by the barbs and 'Forever in our shadow' needling by Swindon fans on the internet and have not 'moved on'. While this may not come naturally to you as a blogger, the only way to demonstrate that you really don't care is to look the other way and ignore it. Completely.
There is a second, more important, point, however - and that is that you make the mistake of extrapolating views expressed by a relatively small number of Swindon fans on the internet across the whole of the club's fan base. Add together the traffic on twitter.com and other fan specific sites such as thetownend.com and (as you rightly point out, the excellent) thewashbag.com and you will get a snapshot of views and opinions from a cross-section of Swindon's support. But is that cross-section representative of the fan base as a whole? I would argue that it almost certainly is not - because the cross-section is self-selecting. It may be diverse in a number of respects, but all of the contributors writing about (for example) Oxford United have one thing in common...they all have something to say about Oxford United. Those that do not, don't post comments.
How many fans contribute regularly to all of these sites? Maybe a couple of hundred. And how many form the fan base as a whole? Take 7,000 regulars and exiles/occasionals numbering several times that number, and you will have several tens of thousands. And this is the important bit. The vast majority of that number care very little for Oxford United, or any other club, other than in the days immediately before and after a game between the clubs.
So you can rest easy. The majority of our fans stopped fretting about the defeat at the Kassam approximately 3 days later when we came back to the County Ground and put 4 past Dagenham without reply. When we followed that win up with another against Cheltenham at the weekend, the Oxford defeat was a distant memory. Of course we don't like losing - least of all to a local rival like Oxford - but it's hardly the end of the world...especially with a title very much there for the taking and the prospect of our first cup win for 43 years (to the day, as it happens).
Very few of our fans display the 'obsession' that you appear concerned with. Sadly, most of those that do will find an outlet for their obsession on the internet. I am sure this is equally true for both sets of fans."
