http://football.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9753,1209575,00.html
escape has become inescapable.
I think that this gfx business is much better escape route these days
Radeon X800XT 10 Man U 0
Football is a childish pursuit. This is the game's charm and its limitation. Sadly, football knows no bounds these days. In any given newspaper - excepting, I suppose, the Financial Times - there will be dozens of pages given over to inevitably repetitive coverage of football, and perhaps a couple to world news. Things are out of kilter. What used to be an escapist activity has become inescapable.
As a sports journalist for the past 15 years, this distorted coverage should have played into my hands. Instead, it merely depressed me. You don't have to interview too many moderate central defenders before concluding that both of you are wasting your lives. They have nothing to say; you have nothing to ask.
.
.
.
Nor is it possible to take refuge in other sports, for they have all been blighted and swamped by football. A Sunday Times sports editor once told me that the three most important sports in the country were "football, football and football". And that was more than a decade ago. Now sports coverage is completely monomaniacal. The Prem, more of the Prem and - why not? - a little bit more of the Prem.
.
.
.
In a reverse of this process, many elderly British gents, who hitherto have professed no interest in the game, have started to pick up on it in their dotage. None more amusingly than William Ress-Mogg who, while on a family holiday in Cornwall last year, wrote a piece for the Times on "the great topic of the day. Will David Beckham go to Spain?"
Citing "Real Madrid's indifferent recent performance in Spanish League football" (as it happens, they were top of the league at the time), Moggy decided that Beckham (whom he compared to Diana, Chaplin and Nelson, and suggested "subconsciously uses Bill Clinton's method of triangulation") should probably not go to Spain.
No matter; this summer when the "great topic of the day" promises to be "Will David Beckham come back from Spain?" Rees-Mogg can have another crack at the 50:50 call. In fact, Moggy was one third right in his comparisons, because there are similarities between Diana and Beckham. They have a cookery O-level between them yet their antics have dominated the media for 20 years and counting. They were made for each other, but sudden death prevented them from ever getting it together.
There was a time when I loved football - when I was six. I was introduced to the game by my father, and we spent many happy years watching Chelsea together. I took a childish delight in my team. Ossie, Hutch and Charlie Cooke were my heroes. Their performances affected my weekend. For my father the results were unimportant. He went to the game to have a laugh with his friends and enjoy his son's innocent pleasure.
Now I am the age that my father was when he first took me to a football match, I am perplexed that so many of my contemparies react to the game as I did as a six-year-old, rather than as my father did as a 40-year-old. You know the type: they arrive at work on a Monday morning in their replica shirt and baldly state: "Don't anyone mention what happened yesterday." What might this be, you wonder. A death in the family? A terminal medical diagnosis? No, it is simply that his team has lost a football match. This event, over which he has no control, will determine his mood and his conversation for the rest of the week. Until another Ford Soccer Sunday on Sky Sports One offers a chance for an improvement of sorts.
Despite appearing to be an adult, and, scarily, being allowed to vote, this person wishes to be defined by his football team. Ich Bin Ein Arsenal Fan. He has opted out of the complexities of human life and adopted a somewhat simplistic persona: Arsenal fan. Given the merest pause in the conversation he will pavlovically and rhetorically ask: "Three greatest Arsenal left-backs of all-time? Lee Dixon, obviously ..." His epitaph will be: "He watched football and read the sports pages." Each to their own, but it seems something of a waste and a retrograde step from half a century ago, when Albert Camus wrote: "A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."
For a reluctant football writer such people are anathema. Dispiritingly, they are also ubiquitous. In the end, the strain of their company became so great, the logistical demands involved in avoiding them so complex, that I took myself off to Norfolk to write a book.
.
.
.
Obviously, the publication of a comic novel is most unlikely to dampen the breadth and extent of the prevailing national fervour. Football will continue to be a placebo for the masses. Phone-ins will be log-jammed, analysis will proliferate, and far from being only a game, it will continue to be, for far too many, the only game. Next month, God help the 72% of us who profess no interest in football, there is the European Championship. An inconsequential tournament that will be covered with the upmost gravity and with all the faux-patriotism that accompanies such occasions.
It is certain to be dismal. But if everyone could start to take football a mite less seriously, there is a slim chance it might become a degree more joyous. And if we are not able to derive any joy from such a childish thing as football, it is probably for the best that it be put away.
escape has become inescapable.
I think that this gfx business is much better escape route these days
Radeon X800XT 10 Man U 0
