It’s been a manic start to 2024 after having a baby just before Christmas, but I thought I’d take a break from changing nappies to write about my beloved West Ham. Keeping up with the absolute madness of West Ham is hard enough with all of the crazy news stories we have, but with a baby, the lack of sleep and continuing to run my own copywriting business, it’s stepped up a whole level.
It’s a completely different experience not attending games at the moment, especially seeing as our daughter has developed a habit of screaming most evenings (colic is fun), meaning we essentially spend every game bobbing her around while watching on TV. I feel like I’ve done a full 90 by the time the full time whistle blows.
Something it’s really made me appreciate is that as fans, we’re all able to enjoy games in our own unique ways. I say ‘enjoy’ – this is obviously performance-dependent. Having such an amazing community on X has really helped me to keep in touch with everything happening at West Ham and I’m forever grateful to have a network of so many brilliant Hammers.
One of the best things about the West Ham family is how accepting, lovely and helpful they are. I had the pleasure of also experiencing the other side of social media in recent months. We’ll blame pregnancy hormones, but I ended up charging head first into a discussion with Joey Barton and his followers.
For anybody that hasn’t seen it, he’s been going on an endless rant, centred around the belief that unless you’ve played at the top level of the men’s game, you’re unable to understand it and therefore women should not be involved in creating content around it.
As you can imagine, as a woman that dedicates her life to creating content around men’s football, I don’t agree with this opinion. In fact, it makes absolutely no sense as you can spend your life learning the intricate details of the game, whereas a footballer might be more focused on their gameplay and nothing else.
For example, Andy Carroll said that he had such little interest in football that he didn’t know who his Liverpool teammates were when he signed and that he doesn’t ever like watching football. Playing football doesn’t correlate with being able to create good content.
Anyway, my comment that suggested that presenting jobs should be based on talent, rather than simply being a male ex-footballer didn’t go down particularly well with Barton’s following. It was actually quite amusing, as I got a good giggle seeing a few people telling me to get back in the kitchen – it’d actually been about five years since I’d been told that.
I seem to have found the place that they all lurk and it was a pleasant reminder of how far football has come for the most part. When you follow the right people on social media, it really can be the best, and when you delve into the dark corners of social media, it’s not a very pleasant place to visit. 0/10 – would not recommend.
To cut a very long-winded story short, here’s to all the brilliant West Ham fans who’ve been so supportive of my journey and all the other content creators out there. We appreciate you more than you know and it’s because of you that publications like Blowing Bubbles Magazine are able to thrive and new content creators are able to come through to the ranks.
On West Ham Network, we’ve continued creating as much relevant, timely and exclusive content as possible to keep everyone up-to-date with everything happening at the club. It’s so much fun working alongside Russ and Anton and the audience is so interactive.
If you fancy taking a peek on YouTube, we have daily news, live shows and most recently, an interview with Dean Ashton where he speaks about whether or not he’d like to play ‘Moyesball’ – you won’t want to miss it. Here’s to many more years of great West Ham content.
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