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| This is not a blog written from a position of authority |
Last night I watched a fella nearly die. Or die a bit and get brought back to life. I'm not sure. The specifics of mortality are sketchy. The universality of it is absolute. Why didn't I turn off? I don't know. The ghoulish desire to be part of a moment maybe. <FEAR OF MISSING OUT> writ large. Something happening. Look. That man is dying. Which is unbelievably appalling really. We're all utter dickheads who've produced a dickhead world. Look at us ffs. Raging over everything as we're if ace when really it's just a mess of egos and waste.
Anyway... Football very occasionally collides with the very things it takes us away from. Those moments are profoundly shocking but they serve to remind us that the game is only a game and that's exactly what makes it a beautiful thing. If you forget that, if you get too wrapped up in it being something it isn't, it becomes just another burden weighing your life down.
I have nothing profound to say beyond performatively swearing in a nihilistic manner. It was minging beyond belief and I'm more than a bit ashamed I voyeuristically lived someone else's nightmare. The lad seems to be ok. Shit happens, his team-mates and the medical staff were immense. It reminded me in a sense of the experience of listening to Hillsborough unfold at the age of 9, which was, without dramatising it needlessly, probably the day I realised definitively that really bad things can happen to people even if you look both ways crossing the road, fasten your seat belt, don't go with strangers and that 'life's not fair' isn't just a platitude.
That's why we watch football. To escape that knowledge. To be part of a little collective bubble in which we all conspire to suspend normality together - all that matters for a bit is that one team get the ball into the other team's goal. An England game is the ideal opportunity for such a frivolous absurdity.
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| Funland |
I've got to be honest from the outset, whilst I might know a reasonable amount about football in general, the specifics of the England team in 2021 are really beyond me. I can tell you about say, Bradford Park Avenue or how Neil McBain had to play for New Brighton at the age of 53, but as for yer Mason Mounts and that, I don't really know who most of them are. I like Grealish cos who doesn't? I always think that Sterling is a bit like the nation's Sullay Kaikai and I feel duty bound to defend him for no real reason other than he looks mad good before he misses from 4 yards and I think 'well, at least he has a go'.
I'm not sure if we've got any defenders who can defend and I reckon Pickford is both the best English goalkeeper in the country and a liability in one bouncy bouncy bouncy body. He's like one of those mad goalies that foreign teams used to have back in the day when England alway picked a very sensible keeper, probably one with a moustache who under no circumstances would ever punch the ball, would stay on his line stoically but was rubbish at kicking and throwing out.
I've barely got an opinion on how we should line up or how we should play. In fact, so much league 1 football have I watched this year (and so little of anything else) I'm still genuinely expecting Jerry Yates will be up front. Why not? I remember when we picked Steve Bull. It was great. I'd regard it as a mind game. Tell the opposition you're so confident that even a third tier striker is better than their ragged lot. That's the sort of tactics that'll win you the Euros every day of the week.
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| No one used to say dickhead things like 'ah, but has he been tested at a Champions League club hmm?' |
As I write, I'm trying to remember the last time I had a strong opinion on England. I think it's probably when Glen Hoddle picked David Batty ahead of both Gazza and Le Tissier. I can already hear people starting to formulate 'yes, but the system...' type responses to justify such an atrocity and all I can say is 'If you think leaving out the two most imperiously gifted and instinctive footballers of their generation in place of an admittedly wholehearted and able player, but one who is essentially a glorified sunday league midfielder is the way we're going to win things, then you're deluded and can stick your 'system' up your arse'
In fact, I think the problem is, I've never got over that outrage and view all subsequent England matches through the prism of that disappointment. It feels like we always put pragmatism ahead of raw skill. Somehow, we even conspired to make Rooney seem normal in the end. What a fucking player he was at the beginning and yet, by the end, he seemed lumpen and stodgy as if the accumulated effect of playing so many games of English football had turned him into everything he seemed to be a glorious break from. Even when we played him in midfield with instructions to 'run the game' it only served to remind us that we just don't produce players like Pirlo and Zidane or if we do, we don't develop them to be an integral part of our teams and end up having to play a tubby bloke who is two slow to play his own position now. You end up with someone way past his best looking like a 5 aside dad who once had trials running through his skills against a team of much younger lads who are quite simply better.
We've come along way from the Charles Hughes inspired notion of maximising the amount of times we can get the ball in the opposition players box, where knocking it long for a big lad (I have to say though, I'm still not certain Andy Carroll wouldn't be a decent shout off the bench for 10 minutes obviously) replaced the sort of patient passing and individual skill that the dastardly continentals would display. We've instead replaced it with a sort of robotic systemised football where the passing is everything and going directly towards the box or taking any sort of risk with the ball is shunned. In both forms of the game, there's a sense that we are suspicious of the maverick and that individuality is a trait for those South Americans and Latin sorts.
Lets see what the game brings... If Grealish isn't starting AND Yates isn't there, I'm sulking.
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| The Geordie Christian Vieri |
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