FOOTBALLFOOTBALLFOOTBALLFOOTBALL

I’ve had to hit the Ibuprofen pretty hard this morning. My skull feels as though it’s interior is lined with broken glass. My eyeballs feel as though they’re ever-so-slightly too small for their sockets. This could be down to a number of factors, but I have a strong inkling as to the prime suspect. There’s an image of a centre circle burned into my retina.

During the world cup, every single day is ‘Super Sunday’.  The premise of ‘Super Sunday’, for the unenlightened, is that there are two televised games in the daytime, along with another in the evening, the latter probably being from Spain where they like to play their games in the evening.  This happens every day now. Every day.

I’ve come to realise that watching football is a lot like sex, pub quizzes, and chocolate éclairs; a great deal of my enjoyment of football comes from actually anticipating football happening. If the football is provided in an unstemmable torrent, as it is now, with little opportunity for reflection, then my enjoyment begins to abate. I watched three games yesterday, and I watched three games the day before. The effect was quite numbing. I moved from excitement to confusion, and then to indifference.

Boredom is a symptom that a slight majority of my friends report when they encounter this sport. They prefer table-hockey or Mario Party 14 or whatever it is that the people who don’t like football enjoy when they should really be enjoying football.

“Why must they kick the ball?” They ask. The answer, to be sure, is that they want it to go into the goal – but is this really a noble aspiration? Does any of it really matter? Is there no more productive use of these people’s time, like accountancy or wigwam manufacture?

It doesn’t really matter, any more than anything else matters. Any more than life, death, cheese tessellation or belly-button fluff matters. Our values are really social constructs; they have no intrinsic value in and of themselves. If you’re going to glean pleasure from watching something, then something about it, however arbitrary, must matter; a ball going into a net (or not going into another net) is a pretty decent candidate.

There was a time, during high-school, where I was one of the people who didn’t like football. I couldn’t say exactly why, but I think it was something to do with the fact that I had to play it. I was shit at football, too lazy to become not shit at football, and not at all inclined to enjoy any activity in which I was shit, owing to the likelihood of my losing and thereby irritating the other people on my team.

Looking back, I think that had I possessed the tactical nous I now possess, I would undoubtedly have dominated the under-11 bracket, and not had to do a great deal of running in doing so. It would have been sweet. Selective quotation of Sun-Tzu would probably have provided an escape from having to do any exercise at all, in defiance of the government’s tsars in charge of tackling endemic childhood obesity.

“Where is your PE kit!”

“The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.”

“You said that last week, and you told me this week you’d bring it.”

“All warfare is based on deception.”

Nowadays, my enjoyment of football comes from the realisation of how terrible I am at kicking a ball. I can’t help but take umbrage with the objections which are now so frequently levelled at footballers, even by those professing to enjoy watching football. The most obvious, boring one is that footballers are all really thick. What a bunch of dullards they are. Does football require any real intelligence? Does it require any real skill?

It’s quite puzzling that these questions are so often asked, and I can only assume it’s because the prejudices of the people asking it preclude them from accepting ‘yes, what kind of crazy question is that’ as a worthy answer.

The most often cited evidence by the ‘footballers are dumb’ inquisitors is that of the post-match interview, during which footballers sometimes reveal that they are not in fact Oscar Wilde. Oh, chortle chortle chortle. GUFFAW. Footballers are so dumb, and I’m so clever. L-O-L.

The next time you perform some task as part of your job, like hand-waxing a Jeep Cherokee or throttling a muskrat, I am going to stick a microphone in your face and ask you a series of inane questions relating to the task. And if you can’t describe your performance concisely and precisely, in terms that a layman can understand, and without hesitating or resorting to cliché, I will call you a blithering nincompoop and as a consequence you will be sad.

“So Steven, are you disappointed with that loss?”

“Pirlo is quite good at football, isn’t he?”

Are there any clever responses to these questions? And is there any other walk of life where this is interrogation is required? Bricklayer? Bank Manager? Moose-hunter? Even porn stars don’t have to put up with this shit after they’ve exerted themselves for hours on end.

The preceding hour-and-a-half the interviewee’s mental faculties have been wholly devoted to the task of winning at football; very little forethought was spared for the cutting asides that might be delivered afterwards.

Here’s another scenario for you to imagine. Imagine that you are the cleverest person in the world. You’re like Stephen Hawking and Mordin Solus put together times a billion. Imagine you are presented with a choice. You can either pay several thousand pounds over ten years in order to complete a doctorate in quantum seismology at the renowned University of Cleverclogsville, or you can be paid several million pounds for kicking a vulcanised-rubber sphere around at Accrington Stanley.

If either option could be argued the cleverer of the two, then it’s certainly the latter. That’s even if you leave aside the considerable financial incentive. Which, let’s face it, I’m not going to do.

That’s enough for this week, anyway. I’ll try to think of a topic that isn’t football related for next week. If only there were something else happening in the world. Hmmmmmmm.

Until next week.

 

Let’s all laugh at United!

I’m going to do a football blog. The news that broke this morning mandates it. If you’re not interested in football, then look elsewhere! For football is what shall be discussed.

The people in charge at Manchester United finally bowed to the inevitable and relieved David Moyes of his duties. Upon hearing the news, I imagine Mr. Moyes then proceeded directly to the most reputable spa in all of Manchester, where a team of highly paid dermatologists set to work removing the beleaguered perma-frown that resulted from having to organise and motivate a crèche-full of overpaid man-children for ten agonising months.

Following Moyes’s appointment last summer, a great many eyebrows were raised. But even the most sceptical of United fans probably didn’t foresee the cataclysm that this season hath wrought.   This has been a season where, week after week, a great many non-football people, upon learning of the preceding weekend’s results, posed the question:

“Aren’t Man United supposed to be good?”

A question to which the answer is yes, they are supposed to be good. This time last year, they had just been crowned Premier League champions, having accumulated a total of eighty-four points. Well, this time around, they have only fifty-seven points. Which means, statistics lovers, that they are only 62.0689655172414% as good at football as they were last year.

They are no longer the best. They aren’t even second or third best. They are the seventh best. Mind you, as Liverpool’s success has demonstrated, seventh is no bad place to be. Seventh gives you momentum. It gives you a sort of elastic potential. If you can’t be fourth, then be seventh.

Ah, yes. The situation with Liverpool on the cusp of triumph is not exactly helping with the grief of the United fans. As for the rest of us, we’ve been left with something of a conundrum; we now have to decide which team we despise the most, now that Manchester United are not worth sparing a thought about.

Making that determination has been something of a struggle. Chelsea or Liverpool win the league? If there’s ever a more revolting ‘would you rather’, I haven’t heard of it. A lot of analogies have been suggested, most involving nails into sensitive areas, and sandwiches containing faecal matter. I prefer to think of it as like ‘Sophie’s Choice’, except that in this instance Sophie isn’t especially fond of either child. I suppose it’s more like ‘Sophie’s Choice’ crossed with ‘The Omen’.*

To me, however, the answer is obvious. I’d really rather Liverpool won it: for the simple reason that Liverpool winning it would preclude Chelsea from winning it. I’d rather watch Gerrard lift the trophy than John Terry. I’d rather watch Pol Pot lift the fucking thing than John Terry.

Whatever your opinion, it’s necessary to want someone to win it. If I’m going to enjoy The Title Race, then indifference is not really an option. Watching a bunch of blokes kick a ball around is insufficient. You have to construct a narrative around the whole thing. That’s what gets box office. If you can’t, then Sky Sports will decide on this narrative on your behalf.

Chelsea are obviously The Bad Guys; a loathsome collection of inexcusable tossers, bankrolled by Vladamir Putin’s BFF, whose on-field leader is an adulterous racist and whose off-field leader is an obnoxious Rumplestilzkin-alike with the magical power of constantly whinging while simultaneously avoiding criticism for constantly whinging. Chelsea spend ridiculous money on players, which is reckless profligacy.

Liverpool, on the other hand, are certainly The Good Guys; the plucky startups who pay all of their players in liquorice allsorts, and whose star quarter-front has persevered in the face of toxic media accusations of racist cannibalism. Liverpool’s transfer policy is vastly different to that of Chelsea; Liverpool refuse to sell players when offered ridiculous money, which is obviously the height of prudence.

I can see Liverpool replacing United as the team-that-everyone-despises quite soon (if they haven’t’ done so already), when we’re all buried beneath the avalanche of smugness which their victory will herald, which now seems almost a formality. But maybe, just maybe, Chelsea will beat Liverpool, and then Manchester City will win all of their games in hand and nick it. I can’t quite decide whether or not that’s desirable, but I’m sure I’ll be wishing it had happened, when scousers with incomprehensible voices begin to audibly masturbate one another in the commentary box.

 

Until next week

 

*If anyone wants to make that film, by the way, then I’d be very much interested in seeing it. Be my guest.

…Millwall, Millwall. You’re all really dreadful, and all your girlfriends are unfulfilled and alienated

Good morning everyone!

Last night, I watched Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, which had a look at some undercover footage of the nation’s football grounds.  Football grounds remain a major front in the war against racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, transpobia, anti-semitism, anti-muslimism, anti-vegetarianism and whatever other new ism or phobia has been appended to the list since I last studied it.

I doubt whether these categories of dickishness are really important; they all form part of a larger war against stupidity.  What is important is that, from the trenches, it appears that this war is well on the way to being lost.  I haven’t witnessed much of this particular brand of yobbery at The Emirates, where the crowd is a pretty diverse lot. That said, it’s the North London Derby the weekend after next; I’m quite sure something distasteful will be chanted, especially in the event that Emmanuel Adebayor at any point kicks the ball.

There are certain sorts of stupidity, you see, that seem to acquire a social licence in a football stadium.  You can, for instance accuse a perfect stranger of being a paedophile, or speculate on the sexual habits of a player’s wife, with relative impunity.  This sort of thing is often excused as ‘harmless banter’.  Now, I’m not going to try and dictate to you all what’s ‘harmless banter’ and what’s ‘inexcusable idiocy’, you’re all capable of making that distinction yourselves.  I’d only suggest that such a line should not jerk wildly from side-to-side depending on whether or not you’re standing in a football stadium.

Now, when discussing discrimination, especially on racial or religious grounds, it’s common to allow a certain sort of uber-simplicity to creep into your rhetoric, if only to pre-empt allegations that you’re a fascist (or something).  The show was called ‘hate on the terraces’ or something.  The accompanying hashtag was ‘#terracehate’.

So here’s a reminder for you all:  Say no to hate!  Say yes…TO LOVE!!!1

God, if I hate anything, it’s that sort of oversimplification.  Is it not important to qualify what’s being hated and why?  Hating nothing at all is a virtual impossibility, achievable only by the vegetative and certain sorts of religious hermits.  Or by those that have procured The Little Book of Calm.  Harbouring some small quantity of hatred is pretty healthy.  Not too much – a ball of the stuff, around the size of a smallish jar of jam, festering in your guts.  It’s the object of your hatred that’s important.

It’s acceptable to hate certain things.  It’s desirable, even; you might go so far as to say obligatory.  Hating things like racism would be a good example.  Others might include hating traffic jams, WKD, and the works of Michael Bay.  Hating an ethnicity, and those that belong to it, is not one of those things.  Because there is no logical reason for it.  Call me crazy, I think this distinction is important, and should be reiterated more often.

So who is going to sort this problem out?  Well, apparently the frontline soldiers of this war are football match stewards.  You know, stewards, the yellow-jacket wearing people whose job it is to tell people to sit down?  Quite what they expect the stewards to do when faced with a horde of football hooligans, I have no idea.  Charge the side of the Uruk-Hai throng like Gandalf in the battle of Helm’s Deep?  Ask them politely to chill out?  Report it to their supervisors?

Well that last one sounds sensible, but I’m not entirely sure why such a report should be necessary.  The thing with football chants is that they are, almost by definition, designed to be projected as far as possible, in order to cause maximum number of people to hear them and so be antagonised.  If a hundred or so people decide to bellow ‘I’d rather be a Paki than a Jew’ across a football stadium, and nothing is done, it seems more of an indication of selective deafness on the part of the people who run the club whose fans are shouting racist bile than on the part of the stewards.  If we’re really serious about leaving stewards to handle this problem, we should probably try and ensure that they have a proper training in Jui-Jitsu, or hostage negotiation – or both; but then they’d probably have to be paid a great deal more than minimum wage.  Perhaps advances in cybernetics will help in this regard.

I really, really can’t work out why people would want to give voice to that sort of phrase, let alone shout it in a public space.  And I don’t feel much qualified to speculate, either.  You’d have to ask some sort of behavioural psychologist (something which Dispatches failed to do).  At the risk of oversimplifying, I suspect the answer relates to the fact that they’re tossers.

I hate tossers.  But their existence is, by and large, not the real problem.  The real problem arises when tossers collaborate with other tossers in order to air their tosserishness in the most overtly tosserish way possible.  That we can do without.  That said, I don’t agree with any sort of speech being criminalised.  But a football club is just that: a club.  Clubs are entitled to exclude whoever they like, and for whatever reason they like.  And the sort of inexcusable melonhead under discussion here is an obvious candidate for such exclusion.

Until next week

Seriöus Business

Good day to you fine ladies, and to you fine gentlemen also.  I hope that your week has been prosperous.  Now, a single subject has dominated the national dialogue recently, and it seems almost inevitable that I address it:

Transfer Deadline Day, for the uninitiated, is like a giant game of musical chairs where all of the nation’s football clubs (and indeed, those of a smattering of other nations) race around getting rid of the players they don’t want and getting in the players they do.  I imagine that those of you that despise this sport find it all extremely boring.  Well, let me assure you all, it is all extremely boring.  But it’s also extremely compelling.  Indeed, these words are very difficult to write, because it’s difficult to write things while compulsively checking Twitter to see if there’s been any movement.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing we’re talking about:  Yesterday, Gareth Bale (a footballer) was confirmed as a player of Real Madrid (a football club) and presented as such in the Santiago Bernabéu (a football stadium, belonging to the aforementioned football club).  His employment contract with Tottenham Hotspur (another football club) was terminated, allowing him to sign a new one at Real Madrid (I’ve already done them).  As compensation for this termination, Real Madrid paid around €100 million (around £86 million) to Tottenham Hotspur.  Mr Bale’s new contract is six years long, and will entitle him to a weekly wage of around £300,000 per week.

Now, in a sane world, the situation I’ve just described would be regarded as laughably impossible.  But football does not operate in a sane world.  It operates a mental football world, whose insanity is all the more disturbing because it is a logical extension of the perfectly rational world that we mortals mostly inhabit.

Yesterday morning saw Real Madrid tweet a picture of Bale gurning from a hospital bed, his naked torso festooned with those little sucker things (the sort that action-movie heroes are prone to tearing off once they realise that they’ve been abducted by paedophile aliens or whatever, and need to scarper quick-sharp). This phase of the transfer ritual is known as the ‘medical’, where the receiving club ensures that the goods are all as they should be, and the selling club isn’t trying to offload a player whose leg might fall off at any moment.

Following this comes a ceremony known as the ‘unveiling’.  Around twenty thousand people attended the unveiling of Bale, which, while piddling compared to the eighty-thousand that turned up for the unveiling of Ronaldo (another footballer), is pretty impressive for a Monday.  Until you remember that this is Spain, where youth unemployment is at 56%.  The perfect backdrop against which to parade an astonishingly extravagant purchase!

I watched the unveiling.  A hundred thousand other people watched it.  People who have no interest in Gareth Bale or Real Madrid tuned in, their curiosity excited by the media machine hysterically shrieking about this transaction.  We all want to experience the bizarre theatre of the hundred-million euro man-monkey.  We all want to see what the fuss is about.

It was underwhelming.  They showed a bunch of photos of his old school, and then some pictures of teenage Gareth Bale at his house, and then playing football with Southampton (another football club).  This montage is accompanied by some truly execrable music by someone called Passenger.  Is this what the Spanish think of the British?  God, is that our ‘thing’ now?  The Spanish have maracas and chorizo and sunshine, and we have bland food and bland music and bland weather?  How fucking depressing.  I can only hope that music doesn’t reflect Spanish opinion of the British.  I can only hope that it was Gareth Bale’s choice, and that he inflicted it onto the Spanish as a sort of passive-aggressive retort to any implication that he might not be worth £86 million.

I ended up utterly numbed by all of this.  I just stared drooling at the screen, my mind vacant of everything except a vague hope that they’d taken adequate precautions to ensure that Bale doesn’t escape his cage, kidnap the nice Spanish presenter lady* and carry her to the top of the tallest building in Madrid only to be shot down by Spanish helicopters.

This ritual seems to be a Spanish thing, because no British club seems to engage in this sort of bullshit.  They just wait all day long and then stick a post on their website saying ‘we bought so and so, he’s quite good, here’s a picture of him’ and then it’s done.

The fee is, of course, ridiculous.  It’s difficult, especially for someone who doesn’t follow football, to comprehend that someone is willing to pay money for someone to kick a ball around.  It’s even more difficult when it’s enough money to buy a fucking fighter jet or a yacht.  It’s fucking outrageous.  But Real Madrid know this.  In fact, the ridiculousness of the fee benefits them in a roundabout way, because a ridiculous fee generates a ridiculous amount of publicity, which will then translate into a ridiculous amount of shirt sales and a ridiculous television audience and general furtherance of Real Madrid as a ridiculous brand.

This plan will be ridiculously successful, since currently everyone wants to fucking talk about it:

“Have you seen?  Parliament voted against a motion to intervene in the Syrian…”

“Have you seen how much they’re going to pay Gareth Bale?”

“They will pay him three hundred thousand pounds per week!”

“That’s errr…forty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven pounds per day!”

“That’s a rather a lot!”

“It’s one thousand seven hundred and eighty-five pounds an hour!”

“Twenty-nine pounds a minute!”

“Forty-eight pence a second!”

“Except every third second…”

“Of course.  I was rounding down for ease of clarity, old bean; obviously he’d earn a round forty-nine pence every third second.”

“How much do you suppose he’d earn in the time we’ve been talking?”

“Enough to buy this round of fine ale, I’d warrant!”

“I’ve stuck my spoon in my eye, and now I’m bleeding!”

So yes, the fee itself serves as a sort of obscene marketing tool.  Some argue that this sort of thing is morally offensive.  They make comments of the following gist:

“A soldier earns £27k a year; Bale earns 300k a week!  DISGRACE!”

While such a statement might put forward a perceived problem, I am not sure that it proposes any real solution.  I am sure that we can’t pay soldiers (or any other public servant, for that matter) the same money Real Madrid have decided to pay Gareth Bale; I can’t give you precise figures but I’m assured that the effect on the structural deficit would be quite catastrophic.

I suppose instead we’re supposed to aspire in the other direction, toward a world where Bale is paid the same £27k that a soldier or a nurse or a street sweeper.  How would this be accomplished?  There are bat-shit crazy solutions, like a switching to mass communism and seizing control of all of the football clubs with some unimaginable display of force.  I’d discount those as unworkable.  But there are other options.  Everyone would have to stop watching so much football, or at least stop paying to watch it.  They would simply need convincing.

When I consider this, I realise that the communist dictatorship scenario is more plausible than the ‘let’s persuade people that football doesn’t matter’ scenario.  It’s often said that religion will never be eradicated, such is the grisly extent of the boner people have for it.  Well, if that’s true of religion, then it’s even truer of football.

Yes, much like any religion, there are people that utterly despise football, and there are those that love it.  There are those that obsess over it and will watch it at literally every opportunity.  They will get into furious blistering arguments whenever someone criticises a player or manager that they happen to love, or defends a player or manager they happen to hate.  They have unbelievable opinions which they impart with unbelievable passion, usually from the stands of a football ground (where there exists some strange social licence to say whatever you damn well please, so long as it’s not racist).  The resulting vitriol is of a sort that normally comes from the mouths of religious zealots or unstable ex-girlfriends:

“I must say I don’t consider this four-five-one to be particularly effective; our midfield is rather congested, and our high defensive line will surely leave us vulnerable to a counter attack.  SORT IT OUT NOW <manager name> YOU STUPID FUCKING CUNT!”

“I must say – oh, what a marvellous tackle that was!  Won the ball cleanly, and he had to as well since – OH MY FUCKING GOD YOU CUNT ARE YOU BLIND?  HE’S FUCKING DONE YOU THERE REF!  YOU CUNT!”

Of course, the media organisations responsible for reporting the events of deadline day are aware of this insane passion.  They thrive on it. They’ve learned to take any minor controversy and wring every drop of drama from it.  Sky Sports News are the undisputed champions of this.  The coverage culminated, as it always does, with a close up of the clock face of Westminster, as Big Ben tolled to signal the end of the transfer window.  Pretty excessive, you might think.  But they won’t stop there.  Over coming years they’ll dial up the melodrama an additional notch.  Then another and another, until we reach the level of pantomime.  A herald might scream the names of those whose transfers have not been completed in time:

“Fabio Coentrao!  THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEE!”

I am convinced that future generations will hold Transfer Deadline Day in far higher esteem than New Year’s Day.  I am convinced that future calendars will be based around it.  It’s already common to hear people say ‘happy transfer deadline day’, all the while thinking they’re being ironic.  Well it’s only a matter of time before all irony is squeezed from that statement by sheer force of repetition.  A hundred years from now, this day will have assumed the same cultural weight as religious holidays like Christmas and Ramadan and that Hindu thing with the lights.

This process seems to be well underway, since, while the churches are emptying, the football stadia are quite full.  People still enjoy a weekend spent congregating in giant buildings, spontaneously breaking into songs designed to venerate their nominated idols and denigrate the infidels who, in their idiocy, support the team from down the road.  Theirs will surely be a fiery torment or, worse, an inferior league position.

So yes, God is dead, and yes, we have killed him.  But we’ve replaced him: with protracted media circuses, outrageous amounts of money, and a smattering of actual sport.  Hallelujah!

Long may it continue!

*she has a name, and it’s Celia Ramirez