Ken Jones: You don't have to support one of the teams to enjoy a football match

It must be 60 years since I last supported a football team. Correction, it is 60 years. You're right, that was back in the war years, the second big one. Growing up in Birmingham, a boy emigrant from the depressed mining valleys of south Wales, my team was Aston Villa. Don't remember why, but I followed them with a passion. If it's going further back than some of us find comfortable to remember, the names are easily recalled: Alex Massie, George Cummings, Frank Broome, Eric Houghton, Bob Iverson and others. They filled my waking hours, sometimes invaded my dreams.

I grew up, moved on and kept moving. Soon, Villa's results, their ups and downs, came to mean very little, in time nothing at all. The bond had been broken, not to be replaced by another. People form emotional attachments to football clubs that last a lifetime but it does not matter very much to me who wins or loses. I'm not a red or a white, a blue, whatever. It was with cold detachment that I watched Arsenal defeat Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday night in the Champions' League. Arsenal are one of the few English teams I'd go out of my way to watch. But that's it. End of story.

Friends tell me that I'm missing something. They can't work out the difference between a follower and a fan. Truth is that I don't need to share in their obsessional subjectivity, their psuedo-intellectual discussions. I'm not cold about the game, just realistic. If they want to speak about pace, touch, imagination and, yes, a bit of spite too, I'm up for it; otherwise I'm heading for the door.

After all these years I no longer look for the results of clubs who have understandably forgotten that I played for them. Back in the 1960s I had a soft spot for Tottenham Hotspur. My cousin Cliff Jones was in the team and I'd formed friendships with a number of the players. Above all, though, it was down to the marvellous football that Tottenham played. I was instinctively drawn to them, much as it was impossible not to be drawn to Muhammad Ali. In that sense, I became a fan again. Now it's only a memory.

There are fans and fans. It's no revelation that the majority of people who follow Manchester United are from elsewhere. Probably, they've got another team tucked away but in the workplace there is no currency like success. Once, on a train, I met a fellow I had not seen for many years. An Arsenal supporter, he wore a club badge in his lapel. A year or so later, I saw him cheering for Tottenham. Realising my astonishment, he launched a pre-emptive strike. "Know what you're thinking," he said, "but it's not true. I never was an Arsenal fan." He was and it possibly makes him unique.

Last Monday night, for want of something better to do, I watched Birmingham City play Aston Villa, the first time they had met in the top division for 16 years. Settled, more or less, by the throw-in that made a monkey out of Villa's goalkeeper Peter Enckelman, a predictably frantic affair crackled with the rivalry I'd known as a boy. There was one big difference. People came on to the pitch, first when Clinton Morrison gave Birmingham the lead then, disgracefully, to taunt Enckelman obscenely following his blunder.

Birmingham have since identified the offenders and banned them from all future matches. However, a remark passed by the club's chairman was quite remarkable in its leniency. "We must make little exceptions to the rules [presumably those of the Football Association] as it is the first time Birmingham have been in the Premier League for 16 years." From here, no exception to the rule is discernible.

However you look at the worst of Monday's incidents, David Gold and his associates got lucky. From what could be seen on television, the security was inadequate, yellow-bibbed stewards positioned at 20-yard intervals. You did not need to be in Colin Jackson's class to hurdle the barriers. What if Enckelman had not shown remarkable restraint when confronted by those idiots? Sounded to me as though Gold was trying to cover his backside.

Anyway, it took me back a bit. In those long ago days a couple of us, for a dare, tried to nip across a corner of the pitch at Villa Park. Halfway there, we were confronted by a burly man dressed in Villa's colours. He spoke sternly in a Scottish accent. The words "boot" and "arse" were mentioned. Nobody messed with George Cummings.