Bloody Football

With the approach of summer; a brief few weeks when football is not played and there is a hiatus in the constant stream of meaningless garbage rammed down our throats about this insipid pass-time; this year we have to endure the four-yearly hyperbole over the world cup. We are expected to treat it as if it matters. With that in mind, I notice an amusing story about one fan who has gone way over the top.

A football fan will get damages of £1m if England are knocked out of the World Cup early and he suffers trauma.

Trauma my arse! It’s a bloody game, that’s all and not a particularly good one at that.

As a child, I hated football because I was forced by sadistic games teachers onto the football pitch and subjected to ridicule because, unlike many of my peers, I didn’t take to the game. Indeed, I found it utterly pointless and tedious. Rather than spend ninety minutes in the freezing cold on a muddy pitch chasing after a bag of wind I could think of numerous less banal and more profitable things to do with my time; poking my eyes out with a sharp stick, or pulling my fingernails out one at a time with a pair of pliers – even throwing myself under a bus would have been better than football. Okay, maybe I exaggerate, but if we are going to talk about trauma; I found ten years’ worth of miserable games lessons, many of which involved football, to be traumatic. It didn’t make me a man, it didn’t make me fit, it merely instilled in me a deep, burning resentment and hatred for soccer. Apart from that, I survived. :whistle:

As an adult, I hate it because it is fashionable (and boy, do I detest fashion). We are expected to passionately swallow this facile, drab waste of time as if there is some degree of importance attached to it, we are expected to hang onto every incoherent rambling colemanball presented to us at press conferences by the players and managers who manage to talk an awful lot yet yet succeed in saying absolutely nothing.

Sure, if you like a game, why not? Go out and enjoy it by all means. It’s the rampant over exposure and self-aggrandisement of the game that really pisses me off. That, and the casual assumption that we should all be interested in both it and the inconsequential minutiae of every aspect of the players’ and managers’ lives.

Now Paul Hucker has insured himself against trauma if his team go out of the competition early. That is taking the piss. It’s just a game, that’s all. Someone has to lose and it’s likely to be England. So bloody what?

“I find when it goes to penalty shoot-outs it gets very difficult and I wanted to insure myself against psychological trauma.”

I recall watching the Senior TT in 1992 from Quarter Bridge. There was an atmosphere of expectation that the Norton team would win this race and the crowd was with Steve Hislop as he rode the works Norton to victory. It was the first time a British manufacturer had won the competition since the heyday of British motorcycle dominance some three decades or so earlier. I recall the euphoria, so I do understand why people follow sport. However, if Carl Fogarty on the Yamaha had won, I’d have been disappointed, but traumatised? Give me a break – it was just a motorcycle race; that’s all. And, frankly, I don’t bore all and sundry who have no interest in the sport.

On the other hand, though, I cannot help but have a sneaking admiration for Mr Hucker if he pulls it off – a million quid for bugger all, that can’t be bad. :devil: