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| Fonz |
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| someone's nan |
Most of you didn't even have the sense to attend a private school or employ anyone on to make things for you and pay them a pittance in comparison to the value of their labour. If only you'd had the insight to do something like that, then we might have all been able to celebrate you instead of being generally disgusted by you getting paid the market wage for your profession. Better still, if you'd inherited your wealth from your parents for doing the square root of precisely fuck all (and ideally if that wealth had in turn been inherited and so on) we'd be able happily decree you as deserving and ignore you completely.
Sometimes you even have the temerity to do stupid things with your own money without even stopping and asking our permission. Sometimes you buy tasteless houses bigger than you need and flashy cars that just make you look like knobheads. Sometimes you get daft tattoos all along your arm and do that thing where you shave your eyebrows like a gangster even though you've been effectively in an incubator in some Premier League academy since you were 9 and are about as 'street' as I am.
Selfish footballers, with your lack of imagination that leads you to play FIFA in your time off. When you're not simulating your day job, you spend the rest of the time playing larksome practical jokes on each other that most 12 year olds would see as beneath them. When we get to hear you speak, you're talking in cliches to avoid saying anything.
And then there's spitting. Spitting! At this time of all times... Not to mention doing naff celebrations, badge kissing then fucking off 5 minutes later, getting caught up in spit-roasting sex tapes and wearing overpriced headphones all the time to block out the real world where the rest of us have to spend our grey, early morning, unremarkable and unblessed lives. Footballers. I see you but you don't see me, too busy glued to your mobile phones and diverting all your thinking to your agents to look around and smell the roasting blend of coffee called 'public outrage'
In fact, while we're in this mood - lets just blame the footballers for everything. Overhyped, overpaid, too much time off. Worse even than teachers and civil servants. A bigger drain on national resources than the homeless and free milk for kids. Lets take all their money and burn it whilst laughing and shouting 'where's your personal chef now eh?' as the millions turn to ashes and we laugh, our anger assuaged.
Actually, lets not.
Instead, we'll face up to the fact that they are just a product of the game's broader trajectory. They're not the cause of its malaise, just a symptom of an illness that took root from the point that the FA relaxed rules around profiting from football clubs by allowing Tottenham's stock market floatation to bypass rule 34 in 1983 before the tide of change saw that rule abolished all together.
Since then, clubs are the toys of very rich people. The players are just the action figures that go along with the play set. They're a commodity like any other. They are workers (albeit very well remunerated ones) and I can't help feeling that our collective jealousy relates more to the way that in that period (1983 onwards,) whilst in general, workers rights have become more diminished and inequality has widened, footballers have succeeded in negotiating ever more effectively for their slice of the revenue that their industry generates.
It's that pie that's the bigger problem. It's sickly, fatty and ruinous and gorging on it is making football ill. Around it sit billionaires, doling out slices of money that could pay for a revolution in education, communication or healthcare, whilst global corporations (TV, sponsors) pour more and more sugar into the recipe. Who can blame the footballers for getting addicted to something so so sweet?
Aren't we all hoping, somehow, to get rich, quick? To isolate ourselves, right now, from a novel virus, but even at the best of times, from the fear of worrying how long we will have to work for, how much of our soul we will have to give in return for heating, clothing and feeding ourselves and our family? Whether we are secure enough, whether we'll ever even fulfil a fraction of the dreams we had as children that everyday seem more of a distant fading memory as the gruelling routine of just getting by grinds hope into so much sad dust
Lets give them a break. Blaming the footballers is like when 'the war on drugs' focuses on the local dealers and turns a blind eye to the big money that brings the narcotics in and out. It's misplaced anger, it's raging at the wrong cause, it's like trying to clear a colony of ants one by one, but not considering the nest. If the problems of the world could be solved by simply blaming footballers... well, it's just too easy, too simple. It's too shallow a solution for what is a problem that cuts to the heart of everything our society is based on.
Young lads will always turn up for trial matches, boots in hand, carrying their hopes of their parents and the weight of their dreams with them. They'd be there, desperate to catch the eye, hoping to have that magic game, to show they have what it takes, whether the stakes were £500, £5,000 or £5,000,000. These aren't calculating individuals who hire and fire according to market fluctuations, they aren't politicians who meddle with economics to promote their own ideological preferences. They aren't sociopaths and psychopaths or examples of unjust, entrenched ingrained privilege. They're just some blokes who are good at what they do and get on and do it.
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| Mike Ashley - Not a footballer |
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| One of the Duke of Westminster's (not a footballer) residences. |
Lets talk about our heroes. The one and only... Mighty Tangerine Wizards!
Without any football to play, the silken skills of the squad have been turned instead to public service and in the absence of a match, we'll review the some of the highlights.
These include:
- Armand, showing a deft touch with his elbows in a strangely silent video where he demonstrates washing his hands. Armand is a talented performer and achieved the same feat he sometimes manages on a football pitch of making normal speed seem like slow motion in a film that will surely, in time come to be regarded as an avant-garde cinema classic.
- Ben Heneghan's fitness routine was re-purposed to inspire others to try planking (amongst other strenuous exercises.) This evoked images of rotund men, whose usual exercise is a less than brisk trot on the dunes with the dog, sweating in front of their TV before collapsing onto the rug, rather resentful of the way their wife's attention had lingered on 'Big' Ben and his tree like thigh muscles.
- Jay Spearing in his back garden modelling staying at home whilst weirdly wearing full training kit to do so, when the rest of the country has finally realised that work-wear is one of the most pointless made up things ever.
The absolute best of these efforts has been various players, pictured with a phone in their hands, in the midst of calling supporters 'to check they are ok'
The cynics amongst us might scream 'shameless marketing ploy' but none the less, there's something quite beautiful about an image of Fonz, (doing his unsmiling shy and soulful look into camera) as he presses the buttons on a mobile phone, about to ring someone's nan and see 'how she's getting on.'
I find this quite beautiful. Fonz is clearly a man who is looking for that connection. He's always at every event, always last off the pitch, always the poster boy for the campaign whatever it is. If anyone in our squad is looking for a human connection, it's Fonz. Everyone is lonely right now. Everyone is isolated. Even the footballers. Even the Fonz.
Remember, our Nathan might not have seen his nan or his mum in a long time. Remember, he might be all cornrows and swagger. He might be infuriating and enigmatic, but this is our Nathan. He's fragile. We all know it. That's why we sing his name. Cos he needs it. Frankly, I'm glad the nans of Blackpool are going to have a chat with him. If anyone can sort anyone's head out it's the nans of this world. If any of our squad needs that, it's wor Nathan.
In fact, so convinced am I of this, I'd be willing to bet, that when, finally, on a magic afternoon at Bloomfield, the football finally returns from this horrible limbo of home arrest, that Oh, Nathan Delfouenso will have such a magical game, one that takes all of the nearly and not quite moments of his career and expresses them into one compressed performance of sheer brilliance that a breathless Chissy will squeak
"Nathan - 4 goals and 2 assists today? Is that the game of your life? Is it something Neil Critchley brought out in you? Where DID that come from?...'
... a bashful Fonz will reply
"Credit to Enid and Beryl. They know who they are. Fair play to them to be honest"
The streets are mostly quiet. The park near my house is echoing with silence. There's something heartbreakingly uplifting about imagining the reactions of a little kid...(who has been climbing the walls, probably scolded endlessly for jumping and demanding to go on the computer and can he have a drink and why does he have to do his school work and why can't he go out)... to the news that he has a phone call and his look of sheer disbelief when it's Jay Spearing on the other end. It would make his day. He'd remember it forever.
The little girl who has to have her birthday party at home, alone with her mum and dad, whose day is saved by getting a few minutes with KDH, the nearest thing to a boy band member our squad has got. Tell me that doesn't make you feel just a little bit of something.
You can imagine, that some of the players might not have been thrilled at the prospect. Not all footballers are wordsmiths (just as not all bloggers would take playing football in front of 10,000 people in their stride) or social butterflies.
You can imagine some of them being a bit nervous. You can imagine the awkwardness at first, the stilted, wooden delivery. Who even makes phone calls in this day and age anyway, especially footballers, when you've got whatsapp and instagram?
Then imagine someone's nan asking all sorts of questions, and the player relaxing, laughing, talking. Not in front of the cameras or with Chissy's mic shoved under his nose, just talking, just someone else listening. Just some bloke talking to an old lady.
She might even say something a bit fruity. He might even blush. Who knows, he might even talk about his own mum, his own nan and get something off his own chest. He might laugh. He might ask his own questions, talk about his kids, her kids. It's just people.
You can imagine, when the call is over, someones' nan telling everyone who calls, everyone who checks on her, that she's fine, because that lovely lad [insert name of player here] called her and they had a lovely chat and not to worry about her.
You can imagine [insert name of player] going back to his exercise bike or his FIFA headset, feeling just a little bit less housebound, a little bit less useless energy fizzing round his limbs. Content for a few minutes that he did something decent.
It might be a small thing. It might be a contractual obligation, it might be good PR but it's something and it's better than nothing. It shows, for all they might be a bunch of mercenaries out for the best contract, for all we might think they aren't aware of their privilege, that really, they're just a group of lads - like any other, and really, for all we slate them, for all we complain about what they earn and how they behave, they're still our heroes and it warms my black heart to see them doing a little gesture to show they appreciate that.
These are strange times and they've brought the best and the worst out in people. I'm glad that even without football, my club can move me, however sentimental that makes me. I'm also glad that the club, in one short year, has come as far as it has in understanding it's duty to the community. It would be unfair to say that everything that happened previously was terrible. Ollie for one, certainly understood that the players needed to be part of the wider local society, but never the less, we're a long way from the mean, penny pinching ethos, where being a Blackpool fan felt, at best, like being allowed to hand over the cash and slightly begrudgingly permitted to partake in a cut price experience. At worst... Well, we all know about that, and suffice to say, the reason why some supporters were getting phone calls wasn't to 'check they were ok...'
Now, I'm just waiting by my phone, for an Ivorian tinged French accent to say 'ello, iz zis Mitch Cook's Left Foot?' He'd cheer me up.
If I got a phone call from FSG or Richard Branson, I'd tell them to fuck right off.
UTMP
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