THERE is nothing wrong with being alone or is there?

It was this question that left me a little perplexed this week. Some people have no qualms with being alone.

Reinaldo seemed to have little problem playing as a lone striker last season. And Miron Bleiberg appeared rather content as the last person on earth that believed himself to be a competent manager.

However, my conundrum had nothing to do with tactics or self-delusion is was a simple case of whether or not to go to last Sunday’s match against Wellington all by my lonesome.

You see, I fell victim to one of the great inevitabilities of the festive season. My small, but usually reliable, posse of Roar fanatics were scattered across various parts of this sunburnt country. Hence, I had no one to go to the game with.

Now being a football fan ultimately results in watching games on television by one’s self. Thanks to the bloke that invented the time zones I find myself on the couch at some rather ridiculous hour following the fortunes of the Socceroos and of course my Premier League team.

I have even been known to watch inconsequential Serie A and Major League Soccer games in a lonely corner of the local pub just so I can consider myself cosmopolitan.

But I have never watched a match in the flesh on my own. It’s not that I’m a big scaredy-cat or have abandonment issues. It’s just that I consider live football to be very much a shared experience.

Surely, it just would not be the same if I were unable to ride the rollercoaster of emotions with my friends by my side.

I considered this and then I thought long and hard about the consequences of going to Suncorp Stadium on my own. For example, would it be acceptable to hug a complete stranger and drown them in my malt and hops-infused breath if Queensland scored a late winner?

Would I have the courage to make my sometimes witty, occasionally sarcastic and frequently caustic outbursts from the stands without the safety that numbers provide?

Would attending the football by myself render me the sort of obsessed nut job that eventually builds himself a small shack in the woods and writes angry letters to club management demanding they break the bank and sign up Cristiano Ronaldo?

In the end I succumbed to my doubts and convinced a Sydney FC fan and two sports illiterate New Zealanders to have a drink at the pub while I watched the game on the big screen.

Maybe I took the coward’s way out. Maybe I lost my right to call myself a fanatic. Perhaps I just think way too bloody much. Irregardless, it is a decision I will just have to live with.

So what do you think? Is attending a football match on your own a perfectly acceptable way to spend an evening? Is something lost when you don’t have your mates there to share the experience? Or, is it the first step to some kind of Unabomber life of seclusion and ultimately madness? Feel free to let me know.