Doyle shares his obsession with the Chelsea faithful

Foul-mouthed, badly behaved, and utterly dysfunctional is one way to describe the most loveable characters that have emerged from the imagination of Roddy Doyle.

It is also a way of characterising the sportsmen who have captured his dreams for almost half a century. The internationally acclaimed writer has opened up to fans of Chelsea football club, which he has followed for 45 years. In an interview with the official club magazine, he said, in typical Irish fashion, all of his friends followed Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester United, but he and one other boy liked the blues.

“My mother set the habit, to be honest, because she knitted me a Chelsea scarf and bought me a plaque to put up on the bedroom wall as well.

“Once these things happen, it’s terminal disorder, isn’t it?” he said.

This all happened after he watched the 1967 FA Cup final on a black and white television and preferred the look of the team in the darker of the two shades of grey.

Doyle, who penned The Snapper, The Van and The Commitments, told his fellow supporters he watched their successful outing in the Champions League Final in May on his own in a Sydney hotel room. After setting the alarm for 4am he celebrated with a stroll alone in the rain alongside the Opera House.

However, the image of the club in the Champions League is a world away from the author’s first trip to Stamford Bridge in 1978. “It wasn’t a good time for the team, but it was ugly. It was hard to endure in some ways, actually: the police presence when you came out of the Tube and the hostility between supporters. I went to a game against Leeds and they beat us 3-0, but I didn’t see a lot of the game because there was so much fighting,” he said.