Football’s a funny old game. Requiring physical application that really doesn’t have a home in the job market, unless kicking microwaves down the aisles of Argos becomes common practice, which seems likely, and one that could make you richer than the King of Swaziland. All this and you don’t even need the mental capacity to know that melted’ isn’t a type of cheese.
However, I am not here to write a scathing polemic on the money in football or the plans to move a game abroad per season…mainly because I don’t really know what ‘polemic’ means and also because I aim to keep this brief.
What I am attacking is this; the fact that every bloody person you ever meet is, was or could have been a professional footballer. This is something that comes achingly obvious the more football circles you swim in and I know you’re thinking don’t fuck with fire and then complain when it burns you with its orangey-arrogance but why?
We are groomed and grown to think that we could do what those on the telly-box do week-in, week-out, if we just had half a chance. We stand and bellow near supremacist insults at our own players when they don’t perform because we can do fifty-two keep ups with a flat ball in our garden.
However, I am not here to write a scathing polemic on the money in football or the plans to move a game abroad per season…mainly because I don’t really know what ‘polemic’ means and also because I aim to keep this brief.
What I am attacking is this; the fact that every bloody person you ever meet is, was or could have been a professional footballer. This is something that comes achingly obvious the more football circles you swim in and I know you’re thinking don’t fuck with fire and then complain when it burns you with its orangey-arrogance but why?
We are groomed and grown to think that we could do what those on the telly-box do week-in, week-out, if we just had half a chance. We stand and bellow near supremacist insults at our own players when they don’t perform because we can do fifty-two keep ups with a flat ball in our garden.
What this cognisance sense of skill does is inevitably lead to six-a-side matches being taken over by those with delusions of grandeur. The now sluggish or unfit but with a mental perception that they could somehow still figure in Fabio Capello’s plans for World Cup 2010. However, the chances of boarding that plane to South Africa stumble with hackneyed phrases such as ‘give-and-go son’ or ‘deliver!’ being bellowed across the astro-turf like a field marshal on the verge of a trench circa The Somme 1916.
The relative ease with which football can be played means that everyone can play. In a socialist ideal it is something of an ideal sport, where the prerequisite could be as crude as ‘have legs’. However, if six-a-sides are to remain footloose and fancy free then would the ultra-competitive types remember this isn’t a game of life and death….it’s an hour on a Thursday night.
1 comment:
I feel I need to point out a flaw in your argument. I have legs and yet, I truly honestly cannot play... although that does mean that I'm probably a shoe in for the next Wales game...
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