Alien capers

STEVE CUMBER uses his imagination like if it to ponder what football could be wasn’t restricted just to humans…

FOOTBALL attracts all types of person to its various teams. Tall, short, fat, thin, mesomorph or ectomorph, teams in our beloved game feature them all.

This is because each type of person brings something different to a specific position. Fat wingers? No. Skinny centrehalves? No. No one body type can do everything.

But what if a football team could sign someone or something) that could give it a huge advantage over its rivals? Something to guarantee winning the Champions League or the World Cup?

I’ve scoured the FIFA website and nowhere does it say that competitive football has to be played only by humans. The only discrimination is in respect of sex (although no doubt, as it’s FIFA, this could be amended by money changing hands). This, as far as I can see, leaves the recruitment field wide open.

For example, an orang-utan could, if well trained, make an excellent goalkeeper. Being an ape, the orangutan is close enough to homo sapiens in evolutionary terms to slip into most football sides without being noticed.

True, he might swing about on the crossbar too much for the referee’s liking, but a good goalkeeping coach should be able to make some progress on this. Other animals could also have potential in this field. One that immediately springs to mind is the kangaroo. Surely those great powerful legs and huge feet could be put to some use in our beloved game. There is a video on Youtube showing a kangaroo attempting to play football, but quite frankly he isn’t very good and would need a heck of a lot of coaching to reach even a nominal standard. In the comments below the video, however, one wag has merely written Wayne Kangarooney, which is either very funny or very cruel. No doubt we could debate the footballing attributes of many other animals (the roadrunner out on the wing for example or a lion in the centre of defence…who’s gonna argue, eh?), but what if we could cast the net a little further. I was recently reading an interesting article on the BBC website about what would happen if the human race finally made contact with space aliens. For decades we’ve been sending messages out into the universe but to date we’ve heard precisely nothing (or so we’re told). There is a dedicated group of scientists around the world called SETI – Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence – who listen into noises from space on a 24-hour basis, and so these guys are likely to be the first to get that “Hello We’re Here” message from the planet Tndhdijfdb. They have been listening since 1959, but the fun is of course that it could happen tomorrow. But what if actual aliens pitched up here on Earth, made contact and proved to be fairly benign? What if they wanted to mingle in and be like us, like in the excellent film Alien Nation? What if they wanted to play football? Science fiction, both in the written and cinematic forms, has given us a whole panoply of aliens and extraterrestrials to choose from. Many of course would be useless at sport. That ET bloke from Spielberg’s epony-