Grow up and forget about tables

WHEN I was a lad, in the space between short pants and discovering girls, I was a geek.

The geekiness was mostly to do with football so it was at least a kind of manly geekiness, but pretty obsessive nonetheless.

It focused on leagues. I’d pick teams from the various divisions and plot their progress on a graph. I’d have league tables made of card and move the teams’ positions around every week.

With friends I formed a Subbuteo league which let us not only to play the games but do all the same leaguey paraphernalia – again.

Today’s equivalent might be that thing on the computer, Football Manager – but with the difference that I’d continue playing it into my 40s instead of growing up.

That’s the thing about league tables – they are very childish. Not just a neurotic desire to know where everyone’s place is, but an insecure need to know where you stand in relation to everyone else, coupled with the more desperate need to find yourself at the top.

I’ve been pondering this over the summer as the Olympics and Paralympics have been infesting the media. Those medal tables have rarely been off our TV screens,

If they don’t get off the bottom of the league, what’s the point?

accompanied by a degree of smugness that would surely that would be none the worse for a good skelp on the bum.

This is particularly odd in the Paralympics where I’d have thought compassion for others who have problems you can empathise with might persuade you to give them a break rather than climb over them to the top then crow about it.

And it’s not just sport. There are the school league tables, introduced by Mrs T, a woman who’d have started a fight in an empty room just to prove she was right that it was empty. Very mature.

Thing is, Team GB only shot up the Olympic league after money and resources were ploughed into athletics. If you don’t do the same for Slurry Road Comprehensive and it never gets off the bottom of the league, what’s the point? You’re just humiliating people for the fun of it, which is kind of adolescent.

Which brings us to Jeremy Corbyn. You’d think his co-operative society thingy would be more kindly. But he’s made his own league table, of MPs who’ve crossed him and who will all be relegated.

I think that means the game’s a bogey.