I arrived back from the TT last week and on my first day back at work, I noticed England flags hanging in the clubhouse of the football club we rent for training. I suggested to one of the students that something must be going on and she told me that it was the Euros. My loathing for football is such that I had managed to successfully block this out – being away on the Isle of Man watching a decent sporting event that requires two balls to partake, was probably a contributory factor.
Anyway, I see a story that caught my eye and Timmy has also commented. Timmy’s take is that this is typical taking the piss British jollity. I’m half inclined to agree. However the other half, reminded of my youth, tells me that this is exactly what I would expect at a football event. I see also that there have been bloodied altercations. Again, contrasting this with the TT where there were no fights to my knowledge as the whole thing was very civilised. I dunno. I never liked football. As time goes on, I realise that it’s not just the mind numbing tedium of kicking a ball around a muddy field (or,. worse, watching a bunch of prima donnas doing it) that gets on my nerves but the whole farrago that surrounds it – 1966, 1945 and all that. Yes, one tournament sixty years ago and it’s supposed to be coming home. FFS! grow up.
Maybe it’s just me because I don’t like football and resented every minute of my life wasted by forcing me onto the pitch twice a week for ten years. Or maybe it isn’t me. If the TT and other motor sports events can pass off without this crap, maybe it is football. Either way, I was much happier when I had blocked it out.
I used to play football and supported my local amateur team, but when big money came into the game I came out and have loathed it ever since. Rugby, Golf and Cricket have all gone the same “Money talks”, they say, but to me it has resulted in misery as the games that I loved have been completely spoiled.
A plague on them.
At my senior school football wasn’t played, cricket in summer rugby rest of the year.
Suited me, i never liked playing footy especially and can’t stand spectating whether live or via a screen, but good luck to the many who do.
My problem has been that I wasn’t allowed to just let them get on with it. I was forced to participate. Even now, people ask what my team is. I don’t have one, which flummoxes people a bit.
“…resented every minute of my life wasted by forcing me onto the pitch twice a week for ten years.”
Me too. Also this experience convinced me that I was shit at sport which turned out not to be true, I was just shit at anything involving a ball. I also can’t help thinking that England fans banging on about 1966 gets more pathetic with every passing year, it’s been nearly sixty years now, I’m an old aged pensioner and I was six years old.
The whole footy thing has become stupid.
The industry would still be very profitable even if stadia were empty. The crowd noise added by broadcasters is as fake as the laughter on Have I Got News For You. And just about every other broadcast, right-on “comedy”.
Players are expected to cheat – “professional” fouls, diving, feigning injury after pretending to have been fouled. Threatening the referee.
The total absence of any individual brilliance, just adherence to the mumbling managers game plan. Which includes demanding serious injury on any magic opposition player.
The moronic spectators following “local” teams stuffed with foreigners.
The equally moronic commentators with their unnecessary big microphones competing to see who can say the most stupid, jargon loaded shite in a “doon wie the laads” accent.
Peter O’Sullevan, Bill McLaren, Kenneth Wolstenholme you are sorely missed.
End of rant.
[Sir] Keir Starmer[, KC] shuns England shirt as he watches Euros victory over Serbia – after aides ‘warned it would harm his support in Scotland’
The really sad part is that they’re probably right.
One of the many things I can’t stand about football is the four home teams. I honestly blame football for the SNP. The union was totally settled and unquestioned by the 19th Century, then along came “international” football.
No, along came Miranda Blair. The Scotsman who fooled UK into assuming he was English. Tried to fool the same people that he was “just this guy”, Tone. The geezer with the Estuary accent, and not the Forth or Clyde, the chap who watched Jackie Milburn play at N’castle. Not Charles Anthony Lynton Blair who attended that top of the range comprehensive, Fettes College, freely available to the scions of of any gentleman, or laydee, with the spondulicks necessary. A posh school where one of the “extras” was bum action.
Tone qualified with top marks (and bottom marks).
Tone and the tongue swallower, Broon, thought it would be a wizard wheeze to fuck up the Nation of UK, and stick it to the bigots, by pandering to the loony nationalist minority in each part of UK.
And while we are at it, let’s create little fiefdoms in our bigger cities.
Then he and his dear lady buggered off to make his fortune sucking up to the WEF, the Davosonians, the Gates, the Soroses (I did not say sore-arses), the big money men who keep a low profile.
Euros? What Euros? I thought it was a currency. As for football; it is yawningly boring as far as I am concerned. Fortunately at my school the game was Rugby Union. A man’s game not some prissy nonsense with a bladder.
As they always say, football is a game for gentlemen played by thugs, rugby is a game for thugs played by gentlemen.
I was at a rugby-playing school and hated every facet of the so-called game, even failing to acquire any homo-erotic pleasure from the shared mass-bathing afterwards. Each to their own, I suppose.