Five footballing pet hates

Five of my pet hates


Paul Flynn

THIS week I’d like to leave the latest Premier League machinations aside, and have an audit of where the game is at: a five-a-side, if you will – five football ‘loves’ versus five football ‘hates’. Handshakes over, ‘hates’ wins the toss …

1) FIFA
BEFORE Sepp Blatter trousered his first bribe (I like to think it was a Kinder egg full of gold teeth), football’s governing elite knew how to milk the world’s most cherished ball game. From its earliest days, football’s finest exponents saw a piddling percentage of the pounds, francs and lira they earned. A chicken dinner and a leg-rub was about as good as it got for heroes like Matthews, Mazzola or Michels. For most of the 20th century, players were little more than chattels to chairmen and administrators busy cosying up to biffs like Mussolini and Franco: leaning on referees, threatening players to throw games, shovelling up the sponsorships. Men who never kicked a ball in their lives.
Brazilian bagman Joao Havelange took this sleepily corrupt organisation by its short-and-curlies, and by the mid-1970s, he alone was point-man for a nexus of corporate naughtiness that would make Ken Bates look like a kitten in a marshmallow cardigan. Multinationals and fascist dictators got to dip their beak in the trough. Human nature, I suppose, but if those who purport  to run things are so obviously craven, who is left to steer the game clear of the cheats, match-fixers and sad bleeders who bet on floodlight failures?

2) Money
THE professional game has always run on the rails of money: there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem lies in the huge disconnect between the footballer and the supporter. I’m not hankering to return to the days of players on  a tenner-a-week and a lard butty at half-time (I am, actually), but we run the risk of breaking the bonds of empathy and connectivity. I want Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal to reflect their roots; flooding clubs with competent foreign-born lads is killing the wellspring of local talent. So instead of supporting lads from the same streets as yourself, you sit in a dingy boozer whilst some minted floater from Tokyo goes to the match and watches players from anywhere other than the town your club is supposed to represent.

3) Sky Sports
IT’S just wrong. I accept that BBC and ITV often flounder in a cistern of banality, but I can’t enjoy a game if there’s a over-the-top graphic and a meteor-like whooshing sound every time Frank Lampard hoofs a shot into row 12. It’s like a sports channel run by excitable gimps who’d be better off playing Subbuteo on their mam’s living-room floor. And anything which puts a football supporter’s coin into the claw of he who owns The Sun ‘newspaper’ is, as the man said, ‘middling’.

4) Jersey-pulling at set-pieces
THE letter and the spirit of the law are clear. It is ‘unsporting behaviour’. End of. Just because it has become habitual doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be punished. It is snide and embarrassing. One strong-willed referee should step in and windmill a few red cards during a big televised game and hopefully rid us of this donkeying.

5) The word ‘soccer’
THE continued use of the ugly, infantile and ultimately meaningless word ‘soccer’ is my final peeve. Coined by centre-parting and handlebar-moustache enthusiast and general rugby-playing oaf Charles Wredford-Brown at Oxford in 1863. Used only by those persons cursed with a subliminal hatred or envy for the beautiful game. It’s a word which singularly fails in its duty to describe any activity pertaining to those most pertinent of footballing objects, namely a foot and a ball.
Stay tuned for my Five Footballing Loves… enjoy your football.