The people’s game is now a distant memory for many

THE game has undergone a fundamental change. If anyone has noticed it, they are keeping quiet. More probably, it has just happened and no-one has thought it worthy of comment.

Too busy. Too many other things to do.

But now there is lockdown and if that tedious restriction has given us anything worthwhile it is time to think.

The game is football, the people’s game, our game. We used to own it, but that is not quite the case anymore. So what is this change and why does it matter?

Well, consider the following scenario and notice where you fit into it, if anywhere. It begins with an aged tennis ball, bald, devoid of any woolly fleece it may have had.

It is still suitable for kicking against a garage door or against an outline chalked on a garden wall or something similar.

In time, the ball graduates into a football, also long past its prime and probably not of an appropriate size, but it will do.

Somewhere there is a patch of turf that is little more than near earth except for periods of the year when a few apologetic blades of green make themselves apparent. This is the pitch. There are no touchlines or goallines, no penalty area, no goalposts or crossbar, no referee or written rules. There are just two jumpers thrown down to mark the goal. This is the defining image of its time.

There are two teams of a sort, but no replica shirts, no proper football boots. The match begins when the owner of the football and at least one or two of his mates turns up.

The score, subject to frequent argument, can stretch into double figures, if anyone can remember where it left off the previous day.

The number of players on each side can vary even as the game goes on and one or more of the participants is called to go home. Darkness is frequently the deciding factor.

After many years of these impromptu encounters, wellmeaning people introduce rules. Leagues are created, mini-soccer arrives.

And the game has undergone a fundamental change.

The joy of throwing down the jumpers and booting the ball vaguely between them is no longer there. Disappeared. Gone forever and with it a sense of enjoyment that can never be replaced by organised football.

Spontaneity was the motto of the period, but somehow it has become irrelevant in this day and age.

What was the people’s game has been taken over. Technology reins supreme. A device on the referee’s wrist tells him if the ball has entered the net.

If a goal is claimed it can now be analysed by

VAR, the video assistant referee, someone remote from the action but with various angles of the incident available to him. If the issue is offside an imaginary line can be drawn and a knee or an elbow may prove to be decisive. But suppose the referee and VAR are looking at an alleged handball.

Now we are back with a matter of opinion and the distant adjudicator adding his to those of the man in the middle with the whistle. Advice on interpretation changes subtly from time to time.

Now what has all this to do with the people’s game? We have come a long way from two jumpers on the ground.

There is no longer a patch of muddy turf, only an immaculate lawn where the people are not allowed to stray.

There is no spur of the moment release of energetic enjoyment.

The people’s game has been left behind.

It is easier to switch on a laptop and play a game mechanically.

There are now two games theirs and ours.

This is the fundamental change that will stifle at birth the instinct to kick an old tennis ball against a garage door.

It is not a situation that should make us happy. Never forget the significance of two jumpers and spontaneity.