Void it now

Footballers doing bad things. Getting paid loads of money to roll around on the floor, spit, and grunt monosyllabic responses to earnest young men and women asking them earnest questions in an enthusiastic manner. 

They're a terrible influence on the youth of today, with their tattoos and their funny little eyebrow shaving things and their toxic culture of anodyne masculinity. 

It's fun to poke and prod at their education. How dare they be really fucking good at something and not simultaneously really good at other stuff at the same time. Did you know clever people like Brian Cox or Mary Beard are also so good at football they could probably get a game for at least Charlton Athletic. They just don't want to. It's beneath them. 

There's no Charlton Athletic players who could anchor an entire series on the universe or write at length about the gender politics of the late Byzantine empire. That's because footballers are inferior creatures, not built for thinking, built instead for heading and running and jumping, for kicking and sliding and leaping. Essentially little more than cattle. 

With this opinion in mind (which must be true cos literally loads of people think it and that's serious truth in a post truth world) you'd hope that the likes of Troy Deeney and Danny Rose would be held up by the general population as beautiful anomalies. Heralded as triumphant examples, proving that free will does exist and we aren't all simply programmed by our DNA to follow fate in a slavishly algorithmic way or entirely en thrall to our circumstances and social role. 

You'd think that a footballer who said 'hang on a minute, is it a good idea to all go running about and doing the jumping, sweating, breathing, grabbing, grabbing, verging on homoerotic ballet we do every week at THIS point in time' would be lauded. 

You'd think people would say 'Good lord! There's a footballer who is thinking stuff. A footballer with feelings and thoughts! Who isn't saying 'y'know what Alan, we'll just take each game as it comes and to be fair, the gaffer has been great' but is instead talking, about what they actually think. 

You'd hope that people wouldn't just respond by saying 'oi, cattle, get back in your field and do what yer told, you get loadsa money and that's as far as I'm prepared to think m8' 

You'd hope that people might be put off the spectacle of ghost football if they knew that some of the players didn't really want to be there. You'd hope that people themselves, the sort of people who look down upon footballers might think twice and question why some of them seemed uncomfortable about being asked to play a sport in which close proximity is part of the very nature of the beast. 

That a game, where some of the players (for it's not just Rose and Deeney who've said this, and in the media trained, media silent world of 21st century top flight football, we can presume they are the proverbial tip of the proverbial iceberg) are literally frightened, might not be great viewing. That's not even taking into account that football in empty ground is complete shit anyway. 

You'd also wonder, if, as we're so quick to jump on footballers for their nightclub indiscretions and their less wise tweets or their choices of home furnishings, if we're so quick to castigate them as appalling role models who should act more responsibly and realise their influence on young minds, then WHY IN THE FLAMING FUCK ARE WE SO DESPERATELY TRYING TO GET THEM TO MODEL THE ONE THING WE DONT WANT GROUPS OF YOUNG PEOPLE DOING IN THE NEAR FUTURE? 

Is it just me? Send kids back to school, but tell them not to kick a ball around. Tell teenagers not to work out their testosterone by wrestling with each other, tell kids not to congregate in groups or gather together with people from outside their family or their little cluster. 

Send them home, not to work out their energy on the local park or on the five-a-side pitch or in the street but to sit in front of the telly to watch a group of young men, from different cities, performing exactly what they're not allowed to do, on telly. Live. 

But it's a business and they need the money. So do crack dealers. Go and buy some and smoke that instead if you can't live without football. Whack on a video showing your kids a load of addicts tieing the belt then mumbling about drifting off into cotton wool and numb bliss. Tell them not to take smack though. It's bad for you. 

But Hendo wants to play. Fuck off. 

Void it.