(Excessive reply to a polite, friendly email about football and Star Wars)
I'm afraid I'm no more football-literate now than I was back in the day. In fact, what was latent hostility to the so-called beautiful game has solidified into something altogether more bitter. Whereas I might once have tried to make faltering small talk about soccerball, I'm now just as likely to start excoriating it loudly and at length, even past the point where the entire pub has fallen silent so that the local firm's AGM can hear me.
I can rationalise this in all sorts of ways. Like any sport played well, it can be a majestic and thrilling spectacle. That's the only plus point that occurs to me. Which negative should I begin with? The pursuit of money above all else? The cynical gamesmanship that defines the sport at every level from kids in the park to millionaires on the pitch? The lack of meaningful sanctions against, or indeed interest in, violence and cheating (does anyone in the game know about video recording yet)? The lack of social responsibility on the part of so-called role models? The legitimisation of tribal violence?
I've already blathered on about this at length here: http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/02/11/the_ugly_game~3713305
Perhaps I'm just not a team player and my hostility to the game is based on unresolved issues from childhood rather than some lofty social consciousness. Still, I'm glad I got off the fence about it. I spent a lot of time last year working with a fanatical Liverpool fan who still nursed a few (real not imagined) injuries from Hillsborough. To him, you can no more be a fair-weather, occasionall football fan than you can be half-pregnant. In his strange, judgemental view of the world, I scored more highly for ladling scorn on soccerball and his endless prattle about underside rulings, Range Rovers, Manhattan transfers, Pele Docherty and penalty spot dunks, than I would have done with a pretended and polite interest in an aribitrarily adopted team.
I don't want to seem entirely negative though. I'm all for genetic experimentation if it would liven things up. I've also submitted to Pannini (they are in charge of every player in the world aren't they?) a list of useful reforms:
1. The goalmouth should be the entire width of the field. Single figure scorelines are extremely boring.
2. Scrap the underside rule. My wife understands it and I don't and this is no good for my masculine pride. Also see point 1 re scorelines
3. Have more than one ball. Also see point 1 re scorelines
4. Introduce video referees with the power to suspend play for as long as it takes everybody to settle down and discover that we are all one and love is the answer.
5. Revise the the fines system so that a top-flight player can expect to forfeit more than 0.0001% of his weekly take-home in the unlikely event that he is caught cheating in a major sporting event.
6. Further revise the fines system so that players who a) cheat and b) enjoy it should face an escalating tariff of sanctions beginnning with humiliation, progressing to mutilation and ending with execution or, worse, being compelled to work on a minimum wage and drive a car worth less than an entire street in south Manchester.
7. Change the law of the land so that having an opinion on soccerball is no longer viewed as the only social skill worth having in the workplace canteen.
That's better. I needed a good rant.
I heartily agree about the latest utterly pointless instalment in the Snore Wars saga. I fear that because it is animated and relatively cheap compared with its forebears, it might turn a profit. I'm not sure that boycotting the film is a good enough way to teach Lucas that the world isn't interested in his ersatz rehash of a yarn that has already bored and enraged his patient fans. Isn't it time a Cinematic Crimes Tribunal was set up at The Hague? Let's see Lucas try his old Jedi mind tricks when he's sharing a bunk with Karadzic. That's something I would pay to see.
guinnessorig
I used to love football at school. Jumpers for goalposts, chopping the legs off some kid from a rival form in sickeningly brutal tackle, one man Wembley, curving pass to the tall lad whose hormones had woken up early and made us all look like dwarves. But that was playing. From one bell to the other we’d be kicking each other up in the air, crafty shimmies, dropping the shoulder, artful feints, going past three, sneaky elbows, catching the trailing leg of some fucker who thought he was Zico streaking down the wing. That said, sexy game though Ruud Gullitt may think it, football is not porn. Watching it does not encourage me to take part myself. And my days of trap, dribble, shoot! are gone.
At work I’m surrounded by canteen pundits. Each with their own loyalty to some local ‘firm’. The Tarn, the Blades, the Owls, Donny Whites, the Mighty Millers, Dirty Leeds. But the thing is, I sense that these men were shit at the game when they were at school. Always picked last, ‘toe bunging’ passes at oblique angles, screaming foul when they got scythed down by a sliding tackle. But now, thanks to Sky+ and parroting the words of Alan Hansen, they’re all experts. I think Tommo needs to use a squarer back four. He’s playing Matty too wide, the lad’s natural game is on the instep, the long ball is a blind alley when it comes to youth development… Every burst of Sky Sports 1 with Vicky Gomersall (phwoar!) is like a testosterone shot in the arse. England internationals dissected and discussed like the battle plan of the Somme; the resemblance is there, I’ll give ‘em that. Chest slapping masculinity. I know about football, I’m one of the lads, OK so I secretly fancy Joe Cole but I’m still a bloke’s bloke… Bollocks. You’re just an annoying fucker. Now switch the telly over and let’s have some Murder She Wrote.