Beautiful game? It’s football crazy for so many men

FEW things make a bigger fool of men than football. And few nations’ men, I have noticed, are more prone to foolishness when it comes to football than Scotland’s.

Back in the 1970s, when six or seven-year-olds like me were waved in free and lifted over the turnstiles by their dads, I sat in Pittodrie stadium in Aberdeen and watched an eight or nine-year-old in front of me leap to his feet and unleash a volley of terms best not said in public at the referee.

He sat back down, glanced up at his father for approval and got it. ‘That’s ma f ****** boy,’ said the delighted grin.

A year or two later my father stopped taking my brother and me to the football. A fan a few feet from us had gone to the toilet and, while he was away, one of his mates had taken repugnant liberties with his beer can. It kicked off when he returned and took his first swig.

Enough was enough, said my dad. Even a goal from Joey Harper wasn’t worth all this.

Those were the dark ages, of course – the days of casual sexism in Carry On films, racism in mainstream sitcoms and heightened passion at football matches because, if there were players as mercurial as Kenny Dalglish and Joe Jordan around, it had to matter.

We know better today, don’t we? We know none of it matters, that whatever gives in a Wednesday night second-tier fixture between Hibernian and Greenock Morton, keeping the rational, grown adult thing going should hardly be a big ask.

There were about 20 of them at the height of last week’s brawl. Hibs manager Neil Lennon, 45, and Morton coach Jim Duffy, 58 this month, were the men in the middle, raging like toddlers, readying the biffing arms for action.

Stupidity

Did Duffy challenge Lennon to a square go? Did Lennon really tell a press conference ‘He started it’?

Here is another question. Why did the police not arrest them? They think touchline skirmishes are a reasonable reaction to events on the pitch? Tell it to a sheriff.

It is, then, against a background of decades of oceangoing stupidity in this sport that we come to consider the remarks of Glasgow-born David Moyes to BBC reporter Vicki Sparks after a postmatch interview. ‘You were just getting a wee bit naughty at the end there, so just watch yourself,’ Moyes told her. ‘You still might get a slap even though you’re a woman.’

His words are perhaps more damning of him when seen in print than heard in the video clip. The Sunderland manager would not dream of slapping a female journalist, I’m quite sure. In his own cack-handed way he was probably trying to charm her, make her feel like one of the boys.

The problem is that, in their almost exclusively male-oriented bubble, men of football can be singularly charmless.

In 1999, I reported on the last England v Scotland match played at the original Wembley stadium. There was the usual nonsense at Trafalgar Square in the afternoon – feeling-no-pain Tartan Army troops lifting their kilts for the London ladies, bottles and glasses flying whenever England supporters came near.

But the abiding memory was that of being in a stand full of Scotsmen taunting David Beckham with a song about his wife Victoria’s sexual proclivities every time he approached the goal line to take a corner. Banter? The kind of knockabout football humour to which dads should be exposing sports-mad children? I’m no apologist for the Beckhams but this was visceral, misogynistic nastiness.

I would accuse the Celtic fans I encountered in Seville in the week of their team’s 2003 UEFA Cup final against FC Porto of nothing so grievous. I just wished sometimes they could see themselves.

Beatings

Days before the match, they were waddling through one of Europe’s most stylish cities in their team colours. Brooding señors strutted across plazas in silk shirts as portly Scotsmen staggered the other way in Celtic shirts specially adapted to accommodate the paunch and with the name of their favourite player on the back. In one hand they clutched a pint and in the other, sometimes, their soberly attired wife. Was this the meaning of give and take in marriage? What hell must she have put him through in Glasgow to make her agree to a city break like this?

That may be the lighter side of marital discord over football. The darker side is there in the beatings some women know they risk taking when their man’s team loses. What is it about football? Do long-suffering spouses fear the return of the die-hard rugby fan from the pub?

Consider, too, the Neanderthal antics of another Scot, Andy Gray, sacked from Sky in 2011 for misconduct which included sexist remarks about a female assistant referee and asking a female colleague to put a microphone down his trousers.

The truth is football desperately needs female officials and journalists like Vicki Sparks to drag the game from the chauvinistic time warp where too many of its exponents come a cropper.

‘It’s not the person who I am,’ insisted Moyes after a careful think about what he had said. Maybe not, but it is the sport that football is.