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Finding the fun in the not-so-beautiful game (Pt. 1)

Disconosebleed

Well-Known Member
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.
 

Disconosebleed

Well-Known Member
Dec 22, 2005
2,553
2,569
Pt. 2, had to put it in a second post due to length!

_________________________________________


Increasingly, much of the fun to be had in football centers on the way it is portrayed in the media. The common po-faced style of football journalism - reporting the facts as they happened and little else - is becoming increasingly marginalized as people want to see cosseted celebrity footballers brought down to earth. Popular website Football365, founded by Danny Baker (of ‘Under The Moon’ fame) deflates egos and punctures pomposity from all angles with its wry take on events. As review website DooYoo says, ‘Football365 is by people that genuinely love the game but also realise that sometimes you have to, as the anthem goes, "look on the bright side of life"!’.



By attacking the soulless side of the game, Football365 doesn’t just provide an entertaining read – it performs an important task in keeping football grounded while the tabloids attempt to build up every footballer as a superhero and every news item as the ‘story of the century’. In January of this year, Bolton Wanderers beat Derby County 1-0 in a dour encounter, in front of a meager crowd on a cold weeknight. BBC Sport’s coverage of the game ran under the headline ‘Bolton Wanderers 1-0 Derby County’ – factually accurate, unarguably dull. Football365’s take on the game? ‘No-One Turns Up To Watch Worst Game Ever’.

While the dismissive irony of Football365 lends a humorous glint to the overly-formal business of football, the lack of self-awareness in ‘straight’ coverage of the game can provide equal entertainment. Home of the cliché, modern football coverage could come with its own tick chart of phrases you’re guaranteed to hear inside 90 minutes – escape the boredom of Arsenal-Derby by guessing which minute someone will remark that ‘there are no easy games at this level’ (not only cliché, but wildly inaccurate – accruing a paltry 11 points from a 38 game season, Derby are routinely beaten like an unwanted stepchild). Enhance your experience of Middlesbrough-Blackburn on a rainy Tuesday night by measuring the likelihood of a commentator observing that any South American players on show ‘don’t like the cold’ while highlighting the merits of the ‘traditional English centre forward’ (read: not very good, but he’s a big lump and he runs around a bit).

In place of old favourites such as ‘over the moon’, ‘sick as a parrot’ and ‘taking each game as it comes’ have arrived a number of fresh alternatives – no game played on a Sunday is anything less than ‘super’, all games between sides at the wrong end of the table are ‘six-pointers’ which will contribute to the ‘relegation dogfight’, while a particularly nasty foul is, without exception, a ‘horrific lunge’ – and if two players square up to each other; don’t worry, it’s only ‘handbags’. Every tough-tackling midfielder is a ‘hardman’ with a ‘fiery temperament’, while the work-shy genius is ‘laid back’ (with less technically-blessed players with similar work ethic issues are given the less forgiving label of ‘lazy’) – and Peter Crouch, the 14ft man-ladder at Liverpool; ‘What a touch…for a big man’.

The art of commentary has taken a similarly humour-laden downturn. How many times have we seen foreign villains reviled for their diving antics in our grittily honourable league, only for pundits to perform an athletic volte face when English stars like Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard tumble, untouched, to the floor like drunks on the long walk home, heralding their gamesmanship as unmitigated ‘intelligence’?

Watch with barely-controlled mirth as Match Of The Day’s ‘expert’ Alan Hansen descends into self-parody with match analysis consisting of nothing but a stream of abstract nouns – ‘Cristiano Ronaldo – pace, power, precision’ – or completely uncontrolled mirth as correspondent and ex-Spurs star Garth Crooks takes the better part of a month to ask the most rudimentary of questions, in a blatant attempt at convincing the world that sportsmen aren’t all brainless halfwits. The quizzical looks and monosyllabic responses he acquires from his footballer interviewees detracts from his endeavour, and Crooks stumbles on oblivious to the irony, lending a farcical edge to the whole affair.

A few well-placed verbs or adjectives may work wonders for Hansen, while the removal of near-all of Crooks’ could eventually see him deliver a question that doesn’t require an interval, but fellow BBC man John Motson is beyond help. When watching recent (and thankfully rare) BBC coverage of an FA Cup tie, one became enthralled not by the lifeless on-pitch inactivity, but listening to Motson and co-commentator Graeme Le Saux strive to create the most pointless duo this side of the inexplicably popular Ant and Dec. Motson, ostensibly the ‘play-by-play’ commentator enlisted with the duty of actually telling you what’s going on, seemed to miss almost everything that occurred – and on the odd occasion that he caught a moment of action, he described it with the accuracy of a Zimbabwean election count.

Meanwhile ex-pro Le Saux, unwilling to be outdone, fulfilled his role as ‘colour commentator’ (ostensibly to provide supplementary information to Motson’s descriptions) with stunning ineptitude – apparently existing only to provide unnecessary play-by-play commentary of highlight footage. At one point,Motson asked Le Saux to give his expert analysis of a long range shot that skewed wide, over video replaying the incident. Le Saux spoke only to confirm that yes, the player had taken a shot, and it had indeed missed the target. After the replay had finished. And a nation of taxpayers rest, happy that their money has been well spent.

And it gets better. 5 Live’s Euro 2008 coverage will include Steve McClaren in the role of ‘expert analyst’, a role he would have been unavailable for had he performed his last job properly and supervised England’s successful passage to the tournament, giving short shrift to the Proceeds of Crime Act declaring that no criminal shall profit from his crime.


There will always be enjoyment in football. As with the superstars that tabloids build up only to knock down so cynically, the more serious football takes itself the more hilarious it will be when it inevitably collapses. While there are fans who can see through the [beep!], there will always be humour in the game – ultimately, the fans make the game what it is. Without the fans there would be no market for a website like Football365, there would be no crowds creating pantomime villains of unsuspecting hot-heads…there would be no fun. If nothing else, take heart from that – but don’t expect any classic Chelsea-Liverpool encounters any time soon. Revolution takes time.
 

Japseye

Member
Sep 20, 2004
75
92
thanks for the write up, i read it to the end, but i dont want to look for entertainment in football, it should be there in my face direct from the ball being kicked with skill i can only dream of around a pitch, with 35-70k screaming fans in the background

while i appreciate your point, i would feel a whole lot more entertained if Spurs started playing some football too, as i haven't seen any for a while....

I am a fan, so i will give them time to get it right, and not harp on about the mistakes made in transfer windows and the like... but if mistakes keep being made and results remain elusive - I will find no entertainment and i will have to watch F1!
 

guate

Well-Known Member
May 12, 2005
3,270
1,486
Great article, voicing what most of us now think.

Living way over here in Central America it's taken me almost 12 years to realize that the Premier League, precisely because of all its hype, is no longer the most entertaining league around, although in terms of highly paid mercenaries it's well stocked with them, and of late I've received untold pleasure simply by watching the German Bundesleague.

Unless it competes with a televised Spurs game

Why, because the stadiums are all full, the passions there and the players generally get up quickly after a decent tackle instead of rolling around like Rooney, Ronaldo, Drogba, etc specifically for their T.V. audiences.

Gamesmanship my arse, f.....g faggots is what is was called in my day !!!!
 

Paxtonite

Active Member
Nov 28, 2004
1,956
32
To be honest the article started quite well and then descended into a plug for football365 and ended up "comentating" like the journos that report "what happened and not much else".

Great quality writing, but i am not sure of what you were trying to achieve and whether it was achieved.

Are we supposed to take pleasure in the panto villains on our pitches or laugh at the quality of football punditry and journalism?

The fact is we watch the game because we want to see our team succeed despite the farce that the modern day footballer has become. (overpaid, arrogant, ungrateful, cheating...i could go on). We do this because we have an affinity with our clubs regardless of the shenanigans that go on and to be honest when my team isn't winning i just don't bother with match of the day or the newspapers the following day. I am sure that is the case for many fans and in any case we become unified even more in the love of our clubs and the game itself through forums such as these. We don't need anyone else. (At the sake of becoming mushy....) We have each other!

It is above all about the "hope" for success for the team we support that keeps us going. No more no less. And even though we (Spurs, not fans in general) are currently rooted to the bottom of the league at the moment we still look forward to the next game and we still "hope" that fortunes will turn. That is what keeps every fan of every club interested. We are probably as self centred as the very self centred players we criticise.

As for whom we hate.... i think that i hate Ashley Cole even more now that i realise how great his mrs is :).
 
Jul 3, 2005
567
0
great stuff; I'm surprised someone with such a clear view of the situation has managed to stay interested enough to write all that. Me, the only habit I have left is leaving the odd post on this bord. Otherwise, I've hardly watched a game this season...I still like playing footy in the park though!

Also, rather than supporting football - I mean in the sence that my grandad wouldve supported football, when the players were representatives of the community, and fans had an actual awe of the spectical being played out before them - it can still make an interesting study; a study of the grotesque, if you will, like world politics, the media, fahsions, etc.12 years ago would anyone quite have predicted the billionare's playground that is the premiership? What does that mean in ten years from now? How will they be able to keep selling the product as a "competition" when spurs, newcastle, w.ham, villa and all those supporters of the supposedly challenging sides walk away from the game out of sheer boredom? When will an england shirt cost a weeks wages of a shelf staker in tescos? When will a footballers wages equal the GDP of an african country? When will going to a mosque provide more singing and raucous entertainment than a top level football club??

...these questions go on and on; but I do believe when you start looking at football in this way a level of mild interest resurfaces.
 

xzander

Member
Jun 25, 2003
166
0
If you think Football 365 is funny, try the football highlights I saw in New Zealand on the late night news. It was a World Cup qualifier weekend and they showed the goals involving the USA while playing the "America! F*ck Yeah!" song from Team America: World Police in the background.

Then they showed the Argentina highlights, and opened up with the summariser saying "Diego Maradona would have turned in his grave at this Argentina performance, if he wasn't high as a kite and still alive". Vintage.
 

spud

Well-Known Member
Sep 2, 2003
5,850
8,794
Well written.

I beat you by one world cup in my own disenchantment of the England team - but for exactly the same reasons. The so-called Premier League has been a non-event for even longer; how can you generate any enthusiasm for something that is so obviously 99% hype and 1% quality?

Being an ex-pat, one of the things that I miss is MoTD. I see live feeds from England and cringe at the over-the-top 'descriptions' of just about every goal that is scored - about 80% of them are (in some way) 'brilliant' - but miss my saturday evening highlights fix. Except for Garth Crooks, who with his ridiculous intellectual pretension is just too embarrassing to watch.

The one thing that has remained - and which will never die - is my enthusaism for and love of Spurs. I have seen us field some appalling teams which have played what could barely be described as football; I have seen us relegated; I have seen us employ (and subsequently dismiss) some of the worst managers to ply their trade in the top division. But I have also seen us win. I have seen some magnificent players and sublime football. I have seen us win trophies, and win them in style.

So you are wrong about one thing: the three certainties are death, taxes, and Tottenham Hotspur. Chelsea is just an aberration, and it will pass.
 

DC_Boy

New Member
May 20, 2005
17,608
5
good articles - football helps fill a void in many peoples' lives including my own

of course I don't view it the same way I did as a child of the 50s and 60s - be worrying if I did

but spurs are still a vital part of my life
 

ravo

SC Supporter
Jun 4, 2004
4,787
2,885
Well written article and quite a good read. Pity about the shamless Football365 plug, and the fact that the content is six months old.
 

Azrael

Banned
May 23, 2004
9,377
14
Funny that this should come up again. I have to say that the article glosses over many of teh real probelsm fo teh game today. Its not just about player attitudes and crap pundits (oh, and how wonderful Football365 allegedly is), but I think there are many more issues as well. I posted this a little while ago, which is my summary of the problems existing today....

I think there are fundemental problems in the game at the moment, at least in English football. To briefly summarise I am concerned about the following:-

1) The CL split. Clubs who compete for the top four space have now joined a different league. They buy and sell players in a world the clubs in the rest of the PL table can't. It's creating a bigger and bigger devide. Some people have said Man City will blow this open. They are kidding themselve if they think that is the case. Man City will knock one of the current top four out of the elite and that will be the only difference.

2) Chelsea and Man U billionaire takeovers. These clubs are now like Tesco and Sainsbury's to the rest of us as small corner shops. It just isn't possible to compete with corporate giants and, in essense, that is what these clubs have become.

3) Transfer fees and salary. Berbs was a good example. £10.9m and then £30.75m, just two years later? £32m for Robiniho? Ronaldo at, at least, £50m? £200k a week in salary? It's silly. Nobody can compete with that sort of money but the very richest clubs.

4) The power of the media. Sometimes I'm convinced that the media partially forces transfers to happen.

5) The uselessness of the PL and FA. WHy have rules if they are not in force?

6) Biased TV deals. It simply isn't right that televised matches mainly concentrate on the top four teams.

7) The culture of managerial sackings and resignations. It's ridiculous that managers spend so little time at clubs these days. I have no respect for impatient chairmen and equally for managers who chicken out because the job is tough (I'm looking at you Curbs).

As for the England team, that's the effect of the "success at any price" philisophy in the PL these days that concentrates more on trophies and money making than it does in developing players, hence poor quality home growns.
 

Crabby

Member
Aug 11, 2004
85
11
Great article, well written and in my view all too true.

You should subscribe to the Fiver which is a daily e-mail sent at around (you guessed it) 5pm by The Guardian, very well written and tongue in cheek.

Anyway, let's get a result Thursday followed by 3 points Sunday with a Pavlechenko goal at the lane.
 

midoNdefoe

the member formerly and technically still known as
Mar 9, 2005
3,107
3,166
I am similarly disillusioned.
I think i like rugby more now, never a lack of passion or commitment, if there is, the chances are that player will get really hurt.
Bring on the autumn internationals.
 

Disconosebleed

Well-Known Member
Dec 22, 2005
2,553
2,569
Well written article and quite a good read. Pity about the shamless Football365 plug, and the fact that the content is six months old.

A lot of people have commented on the Football365 'plug', which is odd because it genuinely wasn't intended like that at all. I've recently submitted the article to Football365, but taking everyone's advice into account I removed the offending paragraphs - didn't want to come across like an obsessive scorned lover if they rejected the piece!

The content is indeedold - I just got the article back from my University as I submitted it as part of my final year. Got a 1st for the article itself - lovely stuff! It was submitted in June, so it's about four or five months old now. I just thought I'd post it here as it was my first time posting a column and this article is the one I've worked hardest on.

I have a more up-to-date column in the makings right now, probably won't be finished for a while but if people are interested and enjoy my style of writing then I'll post it on here - the jist of it is arguing against the idea that money is everything in the Premier League and that without money no one can achieve success. Particularly relevant given the recent malarkey at City.

Cheers for the feedback everyone - any criticism is most gratefully received. I'm determined to make it as a sports writer (regardless of the fact that approximately EVERYONE IN THE WORLD has the same idea at the moment) and taking in feedback on where I'm going wrong is the best way of improving myself!
 

westlondonyid

Member
Dec 2, 2006
114
17
Nice article but not sure what your exact point is.
If it wasnt for my stupidly unhealthy love of tottenham I think i would have love interest in the prem by now but I think the hype around the prem will never go away as there are too many people like me who's enthusiasm is renewed each year that this is in fact their teams year when in reality we all know that the top four and all major trophies are gonna be one 9 time out of ten by the same teams
 

Ravabelly

SC Supporter
Jul 28, 2005
492
252
A lot of people have commented on the Football365 'plug', which is odd because it genuinely wasn't intended like that at all. I've recently submitted the article to Football365, but taking everyone's advice into account I removed the offending paragraphs - didn't want to come across like an obsessive scorned lover if they rejected the piece!

The content is indeedold - I just got the article back from my University as I submitted it as part of my final year. Got a 1st for the article itself - lovely stuff! It was submitted in June, so it's about four or five months old now. I just thought I'd post it here as it was my first time posting a column and this article is the one I've worked hardest on.

I have a more up-to-date column in the makings right now, probably won't be finished for a while but if people are interested and enjoy my style of writing then I'll post it on here - the jist of it is arguing against the idea that money is everything in the Premier League and that without money no one can achieve success. Particularly relevant given the recent malarkey at City.

Cheers for the feedback everyone - any criticism is most gratefully received. I'm determined to make it as a sports writer (regardless of the fact that approximately EVERYONE IN THE WORLD has the same idea at the moment) and taking in feedback on where I'm going wrong is the best way of improving myself!

Definitely post your next piece on here - I enjoyed the read and it's refreshing to read something articulate. I'm plesed you explained the 4-5 month delay though as I had start to think you'd taken 5 months to write it!! ;) Keep it up and good luck in your career!
 

Disconosebleed

Well-Known Member
Dec 22, 2005
2,553
2,569
I've just had word from Football365 that they are going to publish my next piece - it's about our dear captain Ledley King, and actually follows on from a post I made on here.

I'll post a link to it later on once it's up - if anyone reads it and likes it, please give feedback as I've been told that if it's well-received they would ask me to do pieces on a more regular basis. It'd be good to have some positive Spurs articles on there!

Cheers.
 
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