Football Cringe - First Half

Jeepers Creepers. I just had the most uncomfortable walk home from the station, through the normally sedate streets of Lille.

This morning, after having completely caned (in about 4 minutes) the Sudoku in the free rag I grab from a “hand-out jockey” each day at the station door, I decided to use the time I’d bought by solving the puzzle so quickly to look at a bit of “news”. I knew there wouldn’t be anything Earth-shattering on the pages as I’d already enjoyed my usual pint of coffee in front of the BBC News website before my bath 45 minutes earlier. I turned the paper back to the front page, fully expecting to see just one of 2 faces staring up at me, as is usual at the moment. Those faces belong to, on the one hand, Marie-Ségolène Royal (ladies first) and, on an apparently very different hand, Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa.

My blog on these two bods doesn’t need to be written. It simply needs to be typed. The apparent contrast between what they offer, as Presidential candidates here in France, is as stark as any political distinction could be. Note the word “apparent”. I, myself, fear the length of my imminent blog on the subject of these two people. I suspect that one of them will already be enjoying the May sunshine as President of France before I’ve finished saying what I have to say about them but fear not! This is not that blog!..... but it’s coming!

This particular blog tonight relates to the fact that, bizarrely, neither of their faces was on the front of my rag this morning. Instead, there was some waffle about, of all things, football. For those of you who care about such stuff, (and I passionately don’t), the “educated press” had catered to you by deeming a game of football to be more important than real life. Football is fun when you’re a kid but it’s neither difficult to understand nor to do. It’s not even very interesting when you analyse the fact that it’s just 25 morons and a bag of air which need to be in same rectangle at the same time. 3 of the morons “police” the other 22 as they seek to guide the airbag around the rectangle. It’s rarely very exciting either. (Just have a look at how many 0-0 draws there are in the average season). Of course, these are my own subjective opinions so you’ve no need to take much notice of them. I’m happy to concede that, of course, there are some people who find the activity I’ve described interesting, who admire the people who shift the airbag around and who, it seems, assume a complexity that really isn’t there. That’s still all very subjective stuff and I respect their opinions as much as I expect them to respect mine.

However, as much as the levels of skill can be debated and as much as the level of interest is totally subjective, what can be said, with reasonable certainty, is that football, (unless you’ve found yourself someone inane enough to pay you 50k per week to practice it), is, in no imaginable way, important. Bob Shunkly, a former manager of an English team, is reported to have answered a question along the lines of “Mr Shunkly. Do you see football as somehow being a matter of life and death?” with an answer along the lines of “No. It’s much more important than that” (the fact that I’ve paraphrased is deliberate). Meanwhile, back on Earth, there have always been people who have struggled to get to grips with why a grown man would give an answer like that. Personally, I think that the answer he gave was the same as saying “I had my head hollowed out by a boy with a spoon last Hallowe'en. Do you have any lime jelly in your top pocket?” This guy was clearly certifiable and yet, to this day, over a quarter of a century after his death, it’s alarmingly easy to find someone who thinks he was some kind of hero. The language is always evolving. Maybe the words “hero” and “fuckwit” will become synonymous one day.

I’m not so stupid that I can’t see how, in a deprived area, with little other hope of finding any tangible means of attaining self-esteem or a feeling of self-worth, the notions of togetherness, purpose and hope associated with a collective and vociferous support of the local “airbag manipulators” could assume some degree of importance in the minds of the “hard of thinking” but the fact that it’s viewed as being important by such people doesn’t really make it important at all. For the most part, people who think that football (or other similar activity) is important, are deluding themselves in some vain attempt to divert attention away from their own inadequacies. They are saying “my life is shit but did you see the swerve on that corner kick?”

I never intended that tonight’s blog would be about the philosophy of sport and the appreciation thereof at all. I simply wanted to highlight the situation that, as a result of the fact that Lille’s “airbag manipulators” are hosting Manchester United’s “airbag manipulators”, I have to read a newspaper which could have been written by an idiot like Mr Shunkly himself!

I want to try to speak for humanity here! Don’t assume, Mr Murdoch or other such twonks out there, that, just because it’s easy to find people who mistakenly view “airbag manipulation” as being, in some way, important, everyone else thinks that it is too.

What does football mean to me tonight? Easy. A British club is playing against Lille tonight. I’ve already cringed a hundred times at the sound of the dross that the English team has encouraged to come here to follow it tonight. As much as I couldn’t give a whooping fuck who wins tonight, I can’t help hoping for a nice nil-nil. That way, the aggressive dross of Lille and the aggressive dross of the UK can just walk away, getting splinters in their fingers from scratching their heads and the grown-ups can get back to normality nice and quickly.

Manchester 4, Lille 0 = bad

Lille 4, Manchester 0 = bad

Lille 0, Manchester 0 = very, very good

If all of the players just toss it off for 90 minutes and if there are no goals or incidents, that works well enough for me and for the other grown-ups of Lille. At least we can hope to walk to the station tomorrow morning without getting broken glass in our shoes that way. At least I might not need to apologise for my being British for the next 2 or 3 weeks. God almighty! Football! Who the fuck cares? Who gives a shit where the airbag ends up? Nobody’s life is really going to be affected by where the airbag ends up. It’s just playground stuff. It’s the most childlike activity I can think of which still seems to interest alleged adults. What next? Maybe “sandpit hooliganism” or loads of crush deaths at a Tellytubbies event. Get a grip! You’re supposed to be grown-ups. Let it go, for fuck’s sake! Be an adult at some point. How can anyone be misled into thinking that something so daft as these 25 no-hopers is actually of some real importance? Shunkly Shmunkly. Wunkly, more like.

The whole point of tonight’s blog was simply to express to you the fact that, today, instead of something interesting or important on the front of the newspaper, there was a picture of someone kicking a ball and, more importantly, I had to walk past the bars that I always walk past on my way home but, tonight, instead of my hearing a little sedate music or laughter, I had to hear some of the worst dross the UK has to offer, shouting, “singing”, screaming, threatening etc. Ho hum…………