Balls: an incoherent rant

Note: The fol­low­ing entry was writ­ten last Sat­urday, but for some reason I didn’t post it. I think Blog­ger decided that it wasn’t going to co-operate with me. Since then, it’s been sit­ting in a Note­pad file saved on my desktop. As I sug­gest in the title, it’s an inco­her­ent rant — but it’s good to have a rant every now and then. I am aware that cri­ti­cising foot­ball is akin to wish­ing the Queen Mother would fall under a bus. Bear­ing that in mind, I offer the fol­low­ing for your read­ing displeasure …

I heart­ily con­cur with the fol­low­ing point­less opin­ion, dis­covered via I Love Everything:

“People who like foot­ball are scared of real life. They don’t think they’re man enough to inter­act with the world, they don’t have the wit or the pan­ache or the intel­li­gence or the fin­esse that allows a decent human to dis­cuss art or love or the truth of the uni­verse, so they immerse them­selves in a mean­ing­less diversion.”

It seems that pro­fes­sional foot­ballers have voted over­whelm­ingly for strike action over the dis­tri­bu­tion of TV money for the broad­cast of games. Good for them. Up the work­ers. Man the picket lines, etc. I sup­port their action unequi­voc­ally. I think they should take a long period of indus­trial action. In fact, might I sug­gest that all play­ers go on strike for the entire sea­son? The less foot­ball we have on our screens the bet­ter, as far as I’m concerned.

The fol­low­ing is only a per­sonal opin­ion. Foot­ball. It’s just so — so — so — point­less. I have tried — really, I have tried — to enjoy it. I’ve watched some of the big matches of recent years — the ones where the entire nation is spir­itu­ally sit­ting on one big sofa, gripped to the point of hys­teria by the scin­til­lat­ing action hap­pen­ing on screen, and every­one is rev­el­ling in the over­whelm­ing sense of national pride. I’ve tried to enjoy it so that I could take part in the con­ver­sa­tions about “the match” the next day, offer­ing my con­sidered opin­ion on the per­form­ance of “the lads”, and the ter­rible dis­ap­point­ment of the “near miss”. But it’s just so mind-numbingly dull.

Three lions on our shirts. Jules Rimet still gleam­ing. Not liv­ing in the past at all, are we? Those national matches, where the flags of St George are unfurled and waved in pride for Eng­land — increas­ingly, all this means to me is that it’s a good time to go shop­ping, because the queues are almost non-existent. For that, at least, I am grate­ful to football.

Goals are excit­ing. Oh yes, do I not like goals. (Did you spot that? I know my foot­balling par­lance). Goals are good. Pen­alty shoot-outs are fun. Get rid of the dull ninety minutes of run­ning back­wards and for­wards on the field, and just go straight to the pen­alty shoot-out. And, even bet­ter, if Eng­land are play­ing Ger­many, get rid of the pen­alty shoot-out too. Just give the cup straight to Ger­many — we know they vir­tu­ally always win in those situ­ations, try as we might to keep hold of the vain hope that our boys will emerge vic­tori­ous. Simple. Game over. Inter­min­able bore­dom avoided. (Yes, I know that there was the recent tem­por­ary blip where Eng­land man­aged to get some­thing like five goals past Ger­many. But that’s prob­ably all it was — a blip. And besides, it spoils the flow of my argument).

Here’s a quick mes­sage to some foot­ball fans and tabloid news­pa­pers alike: Eng­land v Ger­many games are not a re-enactment of the Second World War. Get over it. “It’s OK, Sybil, I men­tioned the World Cup once, but I think I got away with it.”

Sorry, I’m going off on one now … where was I? Oh yes, this indus­trial action. I read in the BBC News report that this dis­pute is not about play­ers wages. Unfor­tu­nately, I couldn’t read any fur­ther because my atten­tion was inter­rup­ted by a fly­ing pig swoop­ing rather low through my field of vis­ion. Absurd and almost obscene amounts of money are being paid — oh, hang on, I think they actu­ally use shovels these days — are being shov­elled into the high interest accounts of Premier League foot­ballers each week, and now they’re strik­ing for more money. Some of these play­ers are obvi­ously becom­ing aware of how bad this appears to the aver­age foot­ball fan — because they are now stat­ing that the strike is, of course, to help those play­ers in lower leagues who need to be retrained when their careers come to an end. A worthy cause indeed. Yet some­how it still looks like noth­ing more than over­paid primadon­nas fight­ing for ever more cash, and con­sequently it leaves a thor­oughly unpleas­ant impression.

Aside: The foot­ballers = primadon­nas equa­tion. Oh yes. Haven’t you noticed? Your aver­age foot­baller would prob­ably be the last per­son you’d see at the theatre, but it would be the most appro­pri­ate place for them con­sid­er­ing most of their epic per­form­ances. I have never seen such pathetic beha­viour from grown men. They stub their big toe against a foot­ball or trip over another player dur­ing a tackle, and then we watch for minutes on end as they writhe around in agony on the muddy grass. The Dying Swan scene hasn’t got a hope against those guys.

Hav­ing said all that, this is my moment to sup­port foot­ball. I firmly believe in the right to strike. If called upon, I will stand shoulder to shoulder with the play­ers as they demon­strate at the gates of their home grounds (although that depends on them both­er­ing to turn up and show solid­ar­ity with the play­ers in the lower leagues, rather than leav­ing their chauf­feurs in their place instead). This could be a lengthy dis­pute, con­tinu­ing for months, pos­sibly even years. Just ima­gine — all those tele­vised foot­ball matches may have to be replaced with qual­ity movies. Shocking.

I’m not a fan of the beau­ti­ful game. You may have guessed that much.