It’s Thursday and we are having an affair with football

Sarah Winterburn

‘I used to have a table in my bedroom, and a little sponge tennis ball, and would play out all the goals from the weekend’s results out of Match magazine while the football was on the radio.’

Daniel Storey there, ladies and gentlemen, describing the Thursday nights of his childhood. These days, the table is in his ‘office’.

The age gap that stretches into a decade means that my own Thursday night football memories involve peering at a tiny TV in a Chinese takeaway and not minding that 20 minutes had become 40 minutes. But the warmth the memories evoke is the same; Thursday nights are a bloody great night for football.

It’s a night supposedly not meant for football, but that makes it all the more enticing. Saturdays? Old school. Sundays? Like Yorkshire puddings and long walks. Monday nights? Where the weekend never ends. Tuesday nights? Standard. Wednesday nights? That bit sexier on hump day. Thursday nights? Phwoar. It’s like we’re all having an affair with football and feeling simultaneously dirty and guilty. It’s that greasy Chinese takeaway, it’s four pints on a school night, it’s tingles in special places.

‘Thursday night, Channel 5’ has become such an insult that those words from Ashley Cole to Manchester City players reportedly started a tunnel fracas in 2011, while even Bayern Munich fans adopted it to taunt English teams they were knocking out of the Champions League. The chant is still sung now, five years after Channel 5 lost the last terrestrial rights to the Europa League. Because obviously, playing on a Thursday night means you are utterly sh*t, embarrassingly the fifth or sixth best team in the richest football league in Europe.

And so to this Thursday, when the fourth and fifth best teams in the richest football league in Europe face each other in what also happens to be a local derby, between former Real Madrid and Barcelona managers, both struggling to match expectations, right near the end of the season. And it’s on a sodding Thursday. Which already makes it roughly 4.27 times better than if it were played on any other day of the week. Super Sunday has lost all its power but Throbbing Thursday still has traction.

(Of course, it’s not being billed as Throbbing Thursday; it’s Heavyweight Week on Sky Sports, which has somehow made something wonderful and exciting sound slow and cumbersome. Seriously, stop giving things names.)

“But it’s Thursday,” will be the refrain when husbands and wives and mothers and children are told that remote controls are being claimed and laptops being fired up ahead of kick-off in the derby. It’s difficult to persuade anybody that you absolutely have to watch Manchester United take on Genk, but this game – at this stage of the season – is pretty much unmissable. Sometimes, fourth v fifth is far, far more enthralling than first v second.

The correct answer to “but it’s Thursday” is of course “exactly”. It’s Thursday so this is a bonus. It’s Thursday so this is a treat. It’s Thursday so this is ice cream even though we didn’t finish all our dinner. We’ve had the horn since Monday.

Sarah Winterburn