Greed’s damning them all
Boobs Out ’n proud
DANCING On Ice star Denise Van Outen was one of the 90s’ best-loved TV pin-ups and graced the cover of every lads’ mag back in the day.
But instead of shying away from the sexy snaps and implying she was forced into it by an evil media, she is owning it.
“I look back at them fondly,” she says. “I have no regrets. They were fun to do, it was very fashionable at the time and I never felt uncomfortable.”
What a breath of fresh air. No saintly faux victimhood so beloved of girls today, no blame game, no implying females are destined to be pathetic, frail creatures at the mercy of their sex.
The era of the ladette may have had its faults but at least the women had self-belief and balls.
FOOTBALL hasn’t been the game most of us grew up watching for a good while now.
This week it truly became that hateful American term for it, “soccer”, and jumpers for goalposts became piles of cash for fat-cat billionaires.
The fact that the shameless six UK clubs even considered joining the European Super League means they are beyond contempt.
The multi-millionaire owners of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Man City, Man United and Tottenham are nothing to do with our football. Five are foreigners and the sixth, Spurs’
Joe Lewis, is a tax exile. And all of them vile. They have zero respect for anything aside from cold, hard cash.
They claimed they were doing it to “save football” and their Big 12 teams were for “fans of the future”. Balls. Utter, bloody balls. Now thank God, fan power has prevailed and the whole hideous concept of the Super League is unravelling before our eyes.
But make no mistake, they have been forced into it, they’d still have screwed us over without a thought.
And we should never forgive them. Our contempt should be greater than their greed. I mean how do you save a competitive sport by taking away the competition? No one wins, no one loses, no one gets relegated. It’s plastic football for plastic fans watching endless dull European games on a hellish loop of dull pay-per-view.
Our football is more than the match though, isn’t it? It’s about family, mates, shared experiences, venting frustration or celebrating the sheer exhilaration of losing/winning a derby in the local.
It only seems like yesterday that my team’s (West Ham) club shop was a portacabin in the car park selling basics like programmes, badges and scarves.
We stood on terraces for 3pm Saturday kick-offs and our players not only understood the importance of beating Millwall and Spurs, they also felt the same passion we did. Now the club shop is a glossy superstore, the seats padded, the atmosphere corporate, we kick off at 8pm on a Tuesday and some of the players neither know nor care what being a Hammer means.
Kiss the badge but kiss the backside of the next club with a giant pay cheque.
I’m glad my dad – who took me to my first game for a fourth birthday present (we drew against Leeds) – is no longer here to see what his beloved game has become. This isn’t football and never will be.
The brave managers and players who spoke out – like Jurgen Klopp – are to be applauded. Sure they’ve made millions but no one in their right mind signs up for this dirge? Gary Neville’s fantastic rant live on Sky had every one of us who love football cheering.
And he was so right when he called for the teams involved to have all their points deducted, dumping them in the bottom of the Premier League. Take money off them, boycott their games. Let Fulham stay up, relegate Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal.
We all needed to fight back and we should be fiercely proud that we did. This was 150 years of history being dismissed as nothing.
Time to dust off the best football quote of all time from the late, great Bill Shankly, a man who really understood what Liverpool FC was about: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”
The greedy t ***** s backtracking might think it’s all over, but let’s ensure they never forget about the fans ever again.