MARTIN SAMUEL
ON THE CELEBRATION CONTROVERSY
NoboDY learns, nobody grows, nobody hugs. if grandstanding politicians such as Julian Knight and his DCMS committee had their way, this season’s Premier League would play out like Larry David’s blueprint for his hit show, Seinfeld.
Minus the laughs, of course. Football is now being held to ransom over goal celebrations. the season will be suspended if players continue to eschew social distancing in moments of elation.
the government knows the game faces a financial catastrophe if the season is cancelled, so dangles this threat. they didn’t have the brains to devise an effective method of distribution for when a vaccine was finally available, but somehow they’ve got time for this.
As if the most tested people in the country are responsible for the spread. As if the public cannot be expected to distinguish between their circumstances and those of young, fit men, tested weekly and working in secure, sanitised environments. get over it. Paul Pogba signalling for teammates to join him, after sending Manchester United top of the table, is not the green light for you to hold an illegal rave in your auntie’s garage.
You know what’s right and wrong. You know that football has been made a special case. And you know what makes it special, too.
Moments. Chorley’s victory over Derby, Sheffield United’s first win of the season, Fulham’s late equaliser at tottenham.
nobody is watching football for a cold 90 minutes of tactical numbness, a contractual obligation to broadcasters and another fixture struck soullessly from the list. ‘in a clash that is going to go down in history as one of the many football matches that are happening this weekend,’ as David Mitchell had it.
the reason footballers are being tested, are eating prepped meals from cardboard containers while sitting in isolation at the canteen, the reason so much effort is being put into creating sterile bubbles, is to keep the 90 minutes as normal as possible, without fans.
the game you watch must still look like a game, feel like a game, contain those splendid explosions of joy, despair and release. For if that moment is gone, well, what’s the point of it?
So, in the final minute at Anfield on Sunday, if a winning goal is scored at either end, the least natural reaction, the one that would make the spectacle close to unwatchable, would be the thumbs-up, the polite nod, or a dutiful return to starting position for kick-off.
if the last remnant of humanity is to be removed, why bother at all? A goal celebration within reason — no 11-man pyramids — is not, as the Labour MP Clive Efford had it, an ‘insult to nhS staff’. An insult to nhS staff would be the cheer that went up from the Conservative benches when pay rises for public sector staff were voted down in 2017 by, among others, Efford’s DCMS colleague Julian Knight.
Maybe another insult would be the letter Knight sent back to a nurse who was exhausted and struggling financially in 2018, recommending Citizens Advice or the Money Advice Service to help her budget properly.
Knight stopped short of recommending his own book on tax avoidance, one presumes because that stuff isn’t really aimed at poor people. Poor people struggle to avoid tax. it’s what keeps them poor.
Sadly, hugging has allowed Knight and his cronies to mosey up to the moral high ground and deliver another lecture. Yet hugging isn’t a new Year’s Eve party. it isn’t even Eberechi Eze of Crystal Palace breaching lockdown rules by going to watch his old club Queens Park Rangers.
A party, a visit, takes planning. A goal is an instant of unbridled elation. And when that happens, some will remember our present
circumstances, others not. That is the nature of the event and of people.
Wayne rooney described scoring a goal as like coming up for air, having been trapped underwater. The cliche quote is that it’s better than sex, although gary Lineker provides context.
‘everyone can have sex,’ he said, ‘but not everyone can score an important goal.’
glenn murray, still playing for Watford at the age of 37, described it as the best emotion in the world. ‘When a goal comes, i can’t give that feeling to anyone,’ he explained. ‘ Only i can know it. i want my children, my wife, the people close to me to have that feeling, too. But they can’t.’
it sounds intense. and the bigger the match, or the personal circumstances, the more chance there is of an individual becoming lost in his moment. even an old soul like roy Hodgson understands this. ‘You can say there is no excuse for celebrating the goal but it’s one thing to agree with the principle and another to stop it happening,’ he said.
‘When it happens, it’s difficult to push emotions aside, put your Covid head on and ask, “How far apart are you?” The general public should remember that all these players have been tested three times and all are coronavirus negative.’
Of course, that’s a grey area, too. Southampton now believe Danny ings may have been positive when he played, scored and celebrated with team- mates against Liverpool. Yet no further players have recorded positive tests and there is zero evidence of the virus being transmitted in competitive games.
So what we are responding to is the ‘optics’. How this looks to a society in lockdown. and if that is the case, maybe we also need to look at ourselves.
For if you are still blaming something Dominic Cummings did on march 27 for decisions you are making today, it’s not him, it’s you.
and if you are behaving like a professional footballer who has just scored a winning goal having previously tested negative three times in seven days, even though you are not a footballer, haven’t scored and haven’t been tested as much as once, again, it isn’t the footballer who is the problem.
in fact, very little of this is football’s fault. and the sooner we stop falling for red herrings and realise this, the more chance we’ve got.