Welcome to the Travelling Kink Circus that is Aston Villa

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

There's a tantric element to being a football fan. The beautiful game is all about anticipation and accumulated pleasures: if your team are title contenders then you'll wait months for an outcome, sweating every mile, and within days of the season's close you'll already be pining for the next sweet year of agony. Your mistress is a bloke in a tracksuit, winking at you from a press release that promises some key summer signings.

If you're an Aston Villa fan, however, you're into a different bag altogether. You've just had to endure eight months of Tim Sherwood leering over you in a sleeveless leather catsuit, whispering, "You like that, you little slag?" as he leads out a hapless 4-3-3 to certain death in an FA Cup Final against Arsenal. Some of us paid £80 for the pleasure.

For those who enjoy humiliation on the grandest, best-televised scale, it's a cheap buy. You'd think that, instead of leaving commemorative flags and scarves on our seats, they'd have set out riding crops with Tactic Tim's baby blues embossed on the tongue. Despite repeatedly assuring fans that he was giving the squad a much-needed "bit of confidence", he would later tell the press that there was a "losing mentality" in the dressing room; i.e. they're a bunch of losers. It's a tactic of condescension and negative reinforcement that will be familiar to those who study the master/slave principles of BDSM.

If the Martin O'Neill years were just one long tease for a type of football and success that never quite materialised, the seasons subsequent to his departure have become an eerie peepshow of horror. Crap football is nothing new to the Villa Park faithful, but the swirling vortex of bad vibes around the club has now notched up some serious casualties. It almost killed Gerard Houllier, and an attempt to calm the negative voodoo by feeding it one of its own (Alex McLeish) didn't work either. Paul Lambert, his grey eminence, managed to get us playing some really great counter-attacking football. Our back-line remained liable to implode at any minute (and often did), but we always looked like we could score on the break. In a quest to find greater defensive stability, we abandoned the counter-attacking approach only to discover that now, inexplicably, the goals had suddenly disappeared and our defence was shit.

Thus, the cycle of non-reward and punishment went global last year, when a Premier League ever-present somehow became the lowest scoring side in all tiers of European football. The best part? We didn't go down. We're still chained to the whipping post. Our away fans drive for hours to watch as we drown on dry land at grounds all over the UK. It's like a travelling kink circus: the money's handed over, the punishment is dished out. Thank you Tim, may I have another? "Of course you can you TART!"

His heart wasn't even in it by the end; the snarl lost most of its usual steel. After repeatedly slagging off the players, and then the board and the club itself, I suppose he had nothing left to offer. "This is a Cup Final," he told us of his last game in charge, presumably hoping to induce a collective flashback so traumatic that the fans would sit paralyzed by their fear of another four goal drubbing and thus be unable to boo him out of the ground.

I think Aston Villa fans have suffered for so long that they've entered a sort of captive syndrome. With no recourse to the normal situations of football-derived joy, the seemingly endless torture is beginning to take on the stripe of fun. The yearly relegation scrap is starting earlier and earlier – are we getting worse, or have the team somehow picked up on our new appetite for masochism? Maybe the dogfight really is more fun than the respectability of mid-table; at this point, it's starting to seem the likeliest explanation.

We're now facing a home game against Watford that will basically see us relegated if lost, and knowing the fragile mental state of the players, it's unlikely to be pretty. Those who remain of last year's squad seem racked with some manner of survivor's guilt – they've watched QPR getting mashed in the Championship this season and they're thinking, "Why wasn't it us?!" Convincing some of this team to go out and try and win games is almost like wrestling a gun from the hand of a recent widower: "I belong with them!" they scream, as you reach for the tranquilizers. Jackie Grealish is but a boy, he's too young for this shit. Way too young.

In the last few weeks, however, there's been a bit more optimism on display; we've got a French boss again, which seems especially cultured, and we managed a goalless draw against Man City, which is pretty hot stuff. It's a bit like the second act of a saucy melodrama, when the young ingénue is saved from an abusive husband by a dashing foreign gent. But alas, you never know what skeletons he's got lurking in the mansion. One wonders, will Remi Garde take to reading aloud from De Sade in his post match interviews? It wouldn't be the worst thing we've heard recently by any stretch of the imagination.

What this Villa team need to understand, above all, is that survival is paramount, because if we don't stay up we won't be able to relive the same punishing cycle of misery again next year. There are other things you can do to ruin your weekend – golf, for instance – but if you're a Villa fan, sadly, you're trapped in this sick bondage routine. Yes, occasionally you might treat yourself by not watching a game, but the psychological damage has already been inflicted. You could never watch another match and still, years from now, you'd go out for a walk on a Saturday afternoon and find yourself getting heart palpitations for no apparent reason. Because, deep down in your sub-conscious, there's Tactics Tim, barricaded in the recesses of your mind, turning to the MOTD cameras and saying "I think the club is in a hole" with a voice that somehow echoes on – "I think the club is in a hole…I think the club is in a hole…"

Thanks for the eight months, Tim: we'll never forget it.