A report published last week claims that for years officials at England’s top clubs have been carrying out the systematic abuse of hundreds of thousands of adults. Men and women, some of them as young as 37, have been lured in by football club staff with promises of romance, excitement and goals. What they have received instead is something many still find impossible to talk about.
”As I say, at the end of the day, sometimes a reality check can act as a wake-up call and vice versa. But that’s football. Just when you think you’re turning a corner, it jumps up and kicks you in the teeth,” one caller identifying himself simply as ”Dave on the M6” was heard blubbering on the 6-0-6 helpline run by the charity Five Live.
With fewer people attending many Premiership fixtures than turn up for the AGM of the Glasgow branch of the Geoff Hurst Fan Club, questions are being asked. Personally, I blame the managers.
Basically, there is Jose Mourinho, looking ever more like he’s about to burst into a chorus of She (breaking off in mid-croon to wink and say ”And this one’s for all you lovely ladies out there”), Arsene Wenger and that Scottish bloke with a face like a stocking filled with borscht, and then there’s the rest, a bunch of spiritless lackeys all whingeing on about financial muscle and counselling the fans of their club to be realistic. Well, frankly, realistic is not what I go to football for. If I wanted realism I’d stay at home.
And while I haven’t conducted any polls on the topic, over the past three decades I’ve listened to enough people screaming blue murder at a centre forward because somehow he isn’t capable of sprinting 50m in 1,2 seconds to collect those hopeful punts out of defence to suggest that a lot of other fans feel the same way.
And what do we get from the managers of our clubs? Do we get a rallying call, a pledge to go out and wrestle for silverware? No, we bloody don’t.
What we get is: ”We don’t have the resources to win the title, but if we’re at our best, we could just sneak a place in the Champions League.”
Well, what is the point of that? What is the use of a place in the Champions League? Because if you don’t think that, realistically, you have a chance of winning the Premiership then you can’t realistically think you have a chance of winning the Champions League either. What you are saying is: ”We’ll get a place in the Champions League which will earn us enough money to hopefully next year mount a challenge to get into the Champions League again.”
To me, this isn’t football. To me this is life, in all its financially straitjacketed mundanity. If the best that football can offer is the chance to watch a fiscal treadmill, then is there any wonder the fans don’t come? They’re probably at the supermarket, staring at the shelf-stackers. The overall picture is much the same but at least they can pick up some eggs and charcoal for the braai.
Football managers are very fond of drawing an analogy between their sport and armed combat. Last week, Graeme Souness said that if he were going to war he would prefer to have with him the dressing room he has now rather than the one he inherited from Sir Bobby Robson.
I don’t know much about going to war, but one thing I do know — you don’t take a dressing room with you. If you’re worried about taking your vest off out of doors, best stay at home and leave the fighting to the real soldiers.
Be that as it may, let me address the nation’s managers in a language they can understand. Listen to yourselves, chaps, with your ”If we stay free of injuries and get a few bodies in during the transfer window, who knows?” talk. No wonder supporters are staying away. This stuff wouldn’t stir the blood of an anaemic with his head in a centrifuge. It’s like listening to Henry V rallying his troops at the siege of Harfleur by discoursing on the benefits of critical illness insurance.
If Churchill had been a modern Premiership manager he’d have said: ”We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the landing grounds and, though they have much greater economic resources than we have and a much bigger squad and are bound to win in the end, who knows but that we might get a little run going in North Africa that will put a song in our collective throat until, inevitably, it is crushed beneath the mighty Nazi jackboot.”
Stop this defeatism, now. You’re supposed to be competing, not collaborating. It may fly in the face of logic to expect our teams to beat Chelsea. But this is football. Reason alone is not enough. — Â