The Store
Authentic Club jerseys, DVDs, and much more!

You talkin' to me?

Dave Bowler

12/27/07

You’ve heard it before, but it’s time to quote it again. “Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s much more important than that.” So said the sage of the game, Bill Shankly.
As with much of what Shankly said, there was a grain of truth in it, but more, far more, was done for effect, just to stir people up, the press, the fans but, above all, his red army of players.

Shankly loved his role as football’s greatest entertainer, a staccato mix of gangster and stand up comedian, part Al Capone, part Lenny Bruce. Shankly loved to confound, to excite. But since then, his shock in trade quotes have been taken on by those not fit to kiss the boots of football’s greatest manager, words twisted, misused, misappropriated. And now we have a game - a game, mark you - where everybody takes it all just a little bit too seriously.

Let’s not get carried away. For the most part, it’s just a bit of letting off steam that we all indulge in on a Saturday afternoon, nothing more than that. And those of you who remember the violence that attended so many games in the late ‘60s and on into the early ‘80s will all too readily point out that things in our stadia are far, far more pleasant than they used to be. You can now go to a game and be pretty confident that neither you, nor your children, will spend the afternoon dodging bits of terracing lobbed casually in your direction simply for wearing the wrong colours.

But there is something sinister seeping ever more insidiously into our game. It’s most obvious manifestation is a kind of verbal violence that is as savage now as it was at the height of the late 1970s when black players were subjected to monkey chants and the rest of the racist cretins’ incredibly extensive vocabulary. Players are becoming targets of ever more personal abuse. Singing “Tottenham reject” to Sol Campbell was one thing whenever he returned to his former football club, but nowadays, the chants are far more personal, often more savage and, at times, and unforgivably, about a player’s family.

It doesn’t matter how much a player might earn, however privileged his position in society, and however little he might be doing to earn either, that doesn’t give any of us the right to shout anything more than “What a waste of money!” Yes, we are paying their wages, but they’re probably paying yours as well - players have bank accounts and insurance, they shop in supermarkets and department stores, they buy the same stuff we do. Do any of us really fancy having John Terry or Jamie Carragher or Kevin Nolan turn up in your office or factory on Monday and bellow a question about your wife’s most intimate preferences down your ear? Thought not. So what gives us the right to do the same to him?

Up and down the country, you have teams of footballers who look forward to away games, because playing in front of their own fans is no fun any more. We’ve come to that? That the people who come through the turnstiles, “supporters” remember, are no longer supporting their own, unless their own are playing like the Brazil of 1970 and are 3-0 up after 20 minutes. God forbid you should be behind early on because there aren’t many crowds in this country who are going to help you recover any more. Instead, they’re going to hammer you into the ground

But it gets worse. Welcome to the world of Dave Jones, the Cardiff manager. “The abuse I’ve had from certain quarters here is something I’ve not had to endure before. I was getting invitations to have a fight. And you certainly don’t expect death threats.”

Whoa. Rewind there. Death threats? For losing a few games of football? Thankfully, that’s a rare extreme that we don’t often get to. But it’s the sign of a game that is in danger of losing its way. A game where the anonymity of being amid thousands of others is leading to more and more frenzied responses, where the cowardice of the crowd is taking hold.

Professional football has never had much sense of perspective, but what little it had slips away, day by day as the hype, the intense, intrusive coverage takes hold. It’s a game wracked by bipolar disorder, swinging manically from one extreme to the other, each swing getting further and further away from the middle ground, becoming ever more ludicrous as it goes. If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny. But eventually, this game is going to end up like some crazed school kid, gunning people down at random in a shopping mall.

Or we could all just calm down a bit and start to enjoy it for what it is again. The best game on earth. That’s got to be more fun hasn’t it?