I’m talking to you, Tim Lovejoy!
Read more: Aspley Red, Two Footed Tackle
Let’s face it, football is a game peopled by idiots. And that’s probably for the best, because it wouldn’t have survived otherwise. It’s a game swollen with burps of spirit and farts of the soul, everything hinging on rude instinct, because it’s hard to cultivate things like love and hate and outrage and ecstasy against any halfway consistent backdrop of intelligence. But let a distinction be forged here between the earnest idiocy of the penniless, put-upon fan at the fag-end of a 470 mile round trip to Plymouth, and the idiot, populist whimsy of football’s presence in the mainstream media today. That presence, and the faddish half-breed it’s spawned. Match of the Day and its sickly, fawning cronyism. The Championship, football’s very own Fat Camp; a grottily eager concession to the game’s under-the-stairs freakshows and six-limbed freaks. Sky Sports News, with its perpetually looped non-stories, Christiano Ronaldo’s contract, Ledley King’s knees, chaining us all umbilically into the global football economy.
Football coverage today doesn’t cater for right-thinking fans. It births and feeds that breed of facile wannabe’s that first sprung up after Euro ’96, a swathe of uninformed tourists consolidating their gender credentials by reading ‘Supergoals’ as openly as possible in the office and 5-a-siding their way towards mercifully early heart attacks. Without football’s gluttonous self-flagellation in the media, these people would never have happened. Empty insights for a shallow audience.
To be fair, they haven’t an awful lot to work with, the football programmes. I mean, if you were charged with the job of humping so insistently into the grime interest in a league which has been won by four teams in fifteen years, you too might be prone to elements of hyperbole. But there is something rather vulgar about their mission statement: wherever SSN saturation is less than complete, wherever the man in the street can look over his shoulder without seeing a replay of Rory Delap shovelling a clearance into the stands, football will be there. The nectar of the youthful, salaried New Lad, in his pressed, steamed Arsenal shirt, scooping handfuls of dry-roasted nuts into his mouth, reciting Sun Sport editorials to his mates in a loud, breathless voice and stopping me from getting served.
Today, football is the neo-man’s cultural accoutrement of choice, an arbiter of lad-ishness, something to be brayed and boasted and bandied about. The game, accordingly, is everywhere, in easily digestible bites, never more accessible. But how much is enough? Are insight and enquiry doomed to a sad, inverted compromise with exposure? How long before Gary Lineker’s neon-ed face is looming over Piccadilly Circus at 2am, puddles of confused tourists pinned to the streets below, contaminated by that same, idiot fever?
It is a sad fact that the best pundits, analysts and commentators in this country are condemned to the least influential mediums. Without that descriptive impetus, beyond the need to paint a picture, television journalism is lazy, which suits the new breed perfectly. Radio commentators are chefs, TV presenters waiters. It’s not like they’re not out there, it’s just that anybody in the media equipped to speak saliently and compelling about football doesn’t seem to ‘fit’. Alan Green, Darren Fletcher, Simon Brotherton. Ingham, Hall, Inverdale. Any number of regional journos unencumbered by the calculated joie-de-vivre of whatever BBC mouthpiece has been shipped off to Yeovil for a Sunday lunchtime cup-tie, vomiting clichés with merry insistence into tired, hungover brains. The main offender here is Match of the Day, which has long since established the exclusivity of intelligence, personality and experience in its panels. Hansen is the brains of the operation, Wor Alan Sheerah, the cumbersome ex-pro. Adrian Childs and Jonathon Pearce, both one of the lads, both there to defibrillate some life back into MOTD’s working man roots. The white noise of Lawrenson’s endless, flatulent smarm. And John Motson? Good God. The man bares all the authority of a backwards exchange student tackling a Tube map for the first time. Just do the decent thing: give him his honorary Doctorate in Stating The Obvious, then farm him out for two years’ ironic approbation in student unions, before the smell of piss becomes overpowering.
Click on the image for our latest two footed tackle… ouch!
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