The Travel Diva

Football

I have a problem accepting that groups of people gathered together for the purpose of playing a game with an inflated sheep's bladder can be considered business.

If there's a sportsman in the news, having been caught fighting or fornicating in the wrong place, you can be dammed sure it’s a footballer. If there's outrage at the language being used by a disgruntled player who is spitting and shouting at the referee, a footballer will be doing it. If there is a witless teenage jerk that’s paid a king's ransom per week and flaunts it in the most vulgar and flamboyant way possible, it will be a footballer. If there's mass open-air sex among members of a team who've just scored a goal, that team will be playing football. If a team member is knocking himself out, giving an award-winning performance, rolling about in feigned but convincing agony in order to persuade the referee that he has been most foully fouled, it will be a member of a football team.

And the hooligan supporters. They make the case for bringing back conscription better than anything ever did. In no other sport, not one, is there a problem with spectator-supporters having to be corralled and separated from one another in order to avoid inter-fan mayhem. In no other sport is there a problem with players of off-white skin-colour being taunted and insulted on a regular basis, or having coins, bottles, false teeth, fruit, eggs and other highly inventive abuse chucked at them by snout-faced, shaven headed pond life. At no other sporting event is it necessary to build fences to keep fans and players apart. Only football needs that.

There's nothing wrong with football that a complete change in the nature of its players and supporters wouldn't cure. But there's a fat chance of that happening.

The worrying thing about all this is the fact the footballers become role-models for the youth of the UK. How could they not be? They play a game for shed-loads of money, achieve fame, become celebrities, pull birds/blokes, behave like brain-damaged Nazis and get away with it. Who wouldn't want a piece of that?

Labels: soccer; football; sportsmen; hooligans; goal; foul; conscription; spectator; role model;

posted by Cindy-Lou Dale @ Monday, January 19, 2009