Football and heatwaves? I can’t stand either of them
ALL I ask is that we stop assuming that everyone is captivated by football. Millions of us (I strongly suspect) are bored by it and quite a few positively dislike it. But over the past few days, it has been unwise to admit this in public. That’s another thing wrong with the football cult: its belief that everyone really ought to belong and the faint feeling of menace if you won’t join in.
Look, I don’t go and picket stadiums telling football fans they’re wrong or barge into pubs and turn off the football on the TV so that I can have a bit of peace. I wouldn’t do that even if I was a lot bigger and stronger than I am.
But could you just please not say to me ‘Wasn’t it great last night? (if it was great), or ‘Wasn’t it terrible last night?’ (if, as is usually more likely, it was terrible). And don’t say it to anyone else, either, unless you know they’re keen.
It’s very similar to the equally infuriating assumption, common among weather forecasters, that everybody likes hot, sunny weather. Lots of people don’t, and I am currently longing for the western wind to blow again and the thrilling sound of rain beating on the roof at night.
But it is worse. I have played plenty of football and it’s an enjoyable game to play. I have been to big-league matches in giant stadiums and to smaller games lower down the leagues because people have told me I will enjoy myself. I’ve tried watching it on TV because I was assured I would enjoy that.
And I didn’t. There are two reasons. It may once have been exciting, but modern football is extremely dull, which is perhaps why so many big matches have to be decided by shoot-outs which are not really football.
I have never actually seen a goal scored, live, in professional football – because there are so few of them and because I have been so bored for so long that my brain has glazed over and my mind has wandered.
What I have seen is an endless festival of cheating, faking, professional fouls and spiteful minor violence. This is interesting in a way but it is also unpleasant.
And the unpleasantness seems to fit quite neatly into the sweary, loutish, rather callous, unthinkingly Leftish and intolerant modern Britain that I don’t much like either. The New Labour Commissar Alastair Campbell, beyond doubt a real football fan, typifies this.
But I was fascinated by the way that other Blairites, often Oxford graduates from genteel suburbs, all claimed to be keen football supporters and by the Blair creature’s own pretence of being one. David Cameron felt the need to copy this, posing intermittently as a supporter of Aston Villa and of West Ham. Even poor Theresa May (who I suspect cares about as much about football as she does about car mechanics) has had to join in, with aides leaking tales about her being unable to bear the tension of the penalty shoot-out.
It is this sort of thing which makes me feel I have to say, very openly, that I am not a supporter of any team, that I dislike professional football and couldn’t care less whether the English football team (which doesn’t represent me in any way) wins or loses its games.
We aren’t going to be richer, happier or safer if they win, or worse off if they lose. It very fundamentally doesn’t matter, while lots of other things – that nobody gets worked up about at all – matter greatly.
There are many more like me, but they keep very quiet about it and go along with the shouting and backslapping so as to fit in.
That’s exactly why I won’t do it. There’s altogether too much fitting in and conformism going on now and, in such an atmosphere, it’s an actual duty not to pretend to join in with the crowd.