- Dec 22, 2005
- 2,553
- 2,569
It’s hard to pinpoint precisely the day I became bored with football. Perhaps it was the night I watched Chelsea and Liverpool competing to out-dull one another in an encounter so pallid it felt imprudent to watch it on a colour television. Or maybe it was the realisation in the aftermath of England’s 2006 World Cup exit that following the national side was a farcical waste of time – a recurring nightmare where the protagonist isn’t so much falling, as obediently stepping down when faced with opposition of any merit.
What is clear is that somewhere along the line, the excitement I once felt as a child died. Gone are the times I would joyously drink in the first half of a lower-league game on 5 Live, digesting every syllable of the broadcaster’s notes and musings before being rudely halted, the victim of ludicrous bedtime demands from unreasonable parents. In their place is a sober, seen-it-all-before reflection that football simply isn’t as good as it used to be, a wholly dislikeable distortion of its former self. I am a washed out non-fan, incapable of ever again experiencing the giddy peaks and despairing troughs of English football. I’m 23 years old.
Of course, this is nonsense. I love football, despite myself. When Chelsea and Liverpool square off for the inevitable next instalment of their unending struggle for mediocrity, I’ll be there to the bitter, drab end, admonishing myself for not seeing it coming. Like a pauper blowing his last pound on a scratchcard; I should know better, but I live in hope.
But this unconditional love is in spite of the modern game, not because of it. The tendency to view the past through trusty rose-tints cannot be overlooked, but the incessant predictability of current-day football pales in comparison to even the recent yesteryear. In the first seven years of the Premier League (from the inaugural 1992-1993 season up to the 1998-1999 season), ten teams managed a top four position. In the last five years, only five teams have achieved the same success – the Arsenal-Chelsea-Liverpool-Manchester United quadranglehold on the Champions’ League spots interrupted only momentarily by a season of overachievement from Everton. In the 21st Century, it seems there are three unavoidable universal truths – death, taxes, and Chelsea winning 2-0.
So why do we still watch in our millions? Is it out of blind loyalty to our ever-unsuccessful clubs? The false hope that victory might eventually fall upon a side for whom FC wouldn’t more accurately stand for Financial Corporation? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because in this era of humdrum, fans have begun to dig deeper in search of enjoyment. Hate-figures and pantomime villains, Football News websites that are openly anti-football and the magnificently consistent use of cliché in almost all football-related media; there is still plenty to love about the game, you just have to know where to look - and if you can bear to tear yourself away from the latest Sky-televised clash of detritus, there is plenty to enjoy at every ground in the Premier League.
Think, for example, of those players who provide enjoyment to the masses simply through their propensity for being despised throughout football - men that garner such abuse through their actions, it borders on the laudable; certainly, it takes a great deal of concentration and effort to earn such unremitting hatred. Chelsea’s lavish dressing room is packed with the great unloved – step forward Didier Drogba, whose actions compelled the usually-reserved Guardian to describe him as ‘deplorable’ in an otherwise objective piece. This behemoth, brought to Chelsea specifically for his strength and power, has found his impressive goal-scoring exploits overshadowed by a stunning susceptibility to even the slightest challenge – the merest tug of his shirt sending him dissolving to the ground, a puddle of outsize muscles and deceit.
John Terry is equally distasteful. A conflicted soul, he will happily throw himself into the most dangerous tackles with the reckless bravery of a murderer taking his bloodied knife back to B&Q for a refund, only to waggle a salon-manicured finger in the face of any official who fails to award a free kick when a stray elbow brushes his back. And the less said about Ashley Cole the better – arguably the least popular footballer in Britain, by virtue of being disliked not only by all opposition fans, but many of his own supporters as well.
It would be disingenuous to lay all the blame at Chelsea’s diamond-studded door, though. Manchester United’s star man Cristiano Ronaldo tiptoes the line between loveable rogue and arch enemy with ease, one minute dazzling all and sundry with mazy runs and stinging drives, the next putting himself forward as a symbol of everything that’s wrong with football, combining unique talent with an acute awareness of that talent that doesn’t so much scale the borders of arrogance as smash through the perimeter fence, a swaggering blur of hair gel.
Perhaps more enjoyable than these fury-inducing hate figures are the (often self-styled) ‘panto villains’, players so repugnant their actions go beyond the realm of the detested and into that of the comical joke figure, fielded purely for the amusement of spectators. Consider Bolton’s El-Hadji Diouf, initially reviled for a series of spitting instances, but since blossomed into a foolish sideshow – winding up opposition fans with his inimitable blend of inflammatory celebrations and comically ill-judged eyebrow patterns.
Craig Bellamy, West Ham’s terminally broken forward, blurs the line between hateful and humorous with flawless precision – notoriously following a drunken golf-club-wielding attack on a team-mate with a goal celebration mocking the incident. Bellamy once haunted the changing rooms of Newcastle United, the kings of sporting comedy. A travelling circus masquerading as a football team, in recent years Newcastle have been run almost as if subtly satirizing the running of a football club. A combination of genuine talent and various freakshow entrants, they are solid proof that the joy will never entirely be sucked out of football – goalless draws may come and go, but Tyneside will always be home to the reassuringly odd.
It is cheerfully bizarre that a club boasting such talents such as Michael Owen, Jonathan Woodgate and the ever-popular Nobby Solano in the past decade, have also seen fit to employ Mark Viduka, a man of such girth he doesn’t so much put his kit on as pour himself into it, and the Colombian Tino Asprilla, famed for his languid playing style and rather less relaxed personality – taking exception to an opposition player’s harrying in his homeland by pulling a gun from his shinpad and waving it in the defender’s face. Consider also the famed ‘defender’s graveyard’ at their St. James Park home, where defenders who were once highly regarded (Titus Bramble, Stephen Carr, Celestine Babayaro – take a bow) transform into slapstick, error-prone jesters the moment they pull on the black and white strip.
What is clear is that somewhere along the line, the excitement I once felt as a child died. Gone are the times I would joyously drink in the first half of a lower-league game on 5 Live, digesting every syllable of the broadcaster’s notes and musings before being rudely halted, the victim of ludicrous bedtime demands from unreasonable parents. In their place is a sober, seen-it-all-before reflection that football simply isn’t as good as it used to be, a wholly dislikeable distortion of its former self. I am a washed out non-fan, incapable of ever again experiencing the giddy peaks and despairing troughs of English football. I’m 23 years old.
Of course, this is nonsense. I love football, despite myself. When Chelsea and Liverpool square off for the inevitable next instalment of their unending struggle for mediocrity, I’ll be there to the bitter, drab end, admonishing myself for not seeing it coming. Like a pauper blowing his last pound on a scratchcard; I should know better, but I live in hope.
But this unconditional love is in spite of the modern game, not because of it. The tendency to view the past through trusty rose-tints cannot be overlooked, but the incessant predictability of current-day football pales in comparison to even the recent yesteryear. In the first seven years of the Premier League (from the inaugural 1992-1993 season up to the 1998-1999 season), ten teams managed a top four position. In the last five years, only five teams have achieved the same success – the Arsenal-Chelsea-Liverpool-Manchester United quadranglehold on the Champions’ League spots interrupted only momentarily by a season of overachievement from Everton. In the 21st Century, it seems there are three unavoidable universal truths – death, taxes, and Chelsea winning 2-0.
So why do we still watch in our millions? Is it out of blind loyalty to our ever-unsuccessful clubs? The false hope that victory might eventually fall upon a side for whom FC wouldn’t more accurately stand for Financial Corporation? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because in this era of humdrum, fans have begun to dig deeper in search of enjoyment. Hate-figures and pantomime villains, Football News websites that are openly anti-football and the magnificently consistent use of cliché in almost all football-related media; there is still plenty to love about the game, you just have to know where to look - and if you can bear to tear yourself away from the latest Sky-televised clash of detritus, there is plenty to enjoy at every ground in the Premier League.
Think, for example, of those players who provide enjoyment to the masses simply through their propensity for being despised throughout football - men that garner such abuse through their actions, it borders on the laudable; certainly, it takes a great deal of concentration and effort to earn such unremitting hatred. Chelsea’s lavish dressing room is packed with the great unloved – step forward Didier Drogba, whose actions compelled the usually-reserved Guardian to describe him as ‘deplorable’ in an otherwise objective piece. This behemoth, brought to Chelsea specifically for his strength and power, has found his impressive goal-scoring exploits overshadowed by a stunning susceptibility to even the slightest challenge – the merest tug of his shirt sending him dissolving to the ground, a puddle of outsize muscles and deceit.
John Terry is equally distasteful. A conflicted soul, he will happily throw himself into the most dangerous tackles with the reckless bravery of a murderer taking his bloodied knife back to B&Q for a refund, only to waggle a salon-manicured finger in the face of any official who fails to award a free kick when a stray elbow brushes his back. And the less said about Ashley Cole the better – arguably the least popular footballer in Britain, by virtue of being disliked not only by all opposition fans, but many of his own supporters as well.
It would be disingenuous to lay all the blame at Chelsea’s diamond-studded door, though. Manchester United’s star man Cristiano Ronaldo tiptoes the line between loveable rogue and arch enemy with ease, one minute dazzling all and sundry with mazy runs and stinging drives, the next putting himself forward as a symbol of everything that’s wrong with football, combining unique talent with an acute awareness of that talent that doesn’t so much scale the borders of arrogance as smash through the perimeter fence, a swaggering blur of hair gel.
Perhaps more enjoyable than these fury-inducing hate figures are the (often self-styled) ‘panto villains’, players so repugnant their actions go beyond the realm of the detested and into that of the comical joke figure, fielded purely for the amusement of spectators. Consider Bolton’s El-Hadji Diouf, initially reviled for a series of spitting instances, but since blossomed into a foolish sideshow – winding up opposition fans with his inimitable blend of inflammatory celebrations and comically ill-judged eyebrow patterns.
Craig Bellamy, West Ham’s terminally broken forward, blurs the line between hateful and humorous with flawless precision – notoriously following a drunken golf-club-wielding attack on a team-mate with a goal celebration mocking the incident. Bellamy once haunted the changing rooms of Newcastle United, the kings of sporting comedy. A travelling circus masquerading as a football team, in recent years Newcastle have been run almost as if subtly satirizing the running of a football club. A combination of genuine talent and various freakshow entrants, they are solid proof that the joy will never entirely be sucked out of football – goalless draws may come and go, but Tyneside will always be home to the reassuringly odd.
It is cheerfully bizarre that a club boasting such talents such as Michael Owen, Jonathan Woodgate and the ever-popular Nobby Solano in the past decade, have also seen fit to employ Mark Viduka, a man of such girth he doesn’t so much put his kit on as pour himself into it, and the Colombian Tino Asprilla, famed for his languid playing style and rather less relaxed personality – taking exception to an opposition player’s harrying in his homeland by pulling a gun from his shinpad and waving it in the defender’s face. Consider also the famed ‘defender’s graveyard’ at their St. James Park home, where defenders who were once highly regarded (Titus Bramble, Stephen Carr, Celestine Babayaro – take a bow) transform into slapstick, error-prone jesters the moment they pull on the black and white strip.