HALF-DEAD FOOTBALLERS & BOGUS REVERENCE

A heart attack suffered during a game of football is a rare occurrence and clearly one that is going to create a good deal of attention given the obsessive coverage of the mainstream media and seeming inexhaustible interest that much of the public take in the game. It is slightly surprising that it does not happen more often in the intensely physical world of professional sport. I noted it but knowing that a Premier League footballer would be given immediate care and attention hardly considered it to be of any great significance, people suffer heart attacks every day, albeit not usually live on air. It turns out that he survived and there was even a cardiologist in the crowd who, once he managed to get past the security guards which at first blocked his attempt to help, was crucial in keeping him alive.

Subsequently there were two developments both of which are typical of the hysteria, hyperbole and banal, bogus emotional rhetoric that inflates this ridiculous giant balloon of pseudo-serious populist pomposity which surrounds what was once a simple game of football. First there was the endless stream of people from the football ‘community’ ( shouldn’t that be business ? ) falling over themselves to make it clear how shocked they were and that the event ‘put football into perspective.’ This implies that the importance of football is normally not in perspective, so if not, why not ? The over familiar phrases of ’ our hearts go out to his family and loved ones’ or ’our thoughts are with him’ that are trotted out with all the meaning and conviction of the lines in a birthday card are surely more about gaining approval for those that queue up to be quoted and take the opportunity to give the sport the semblance of being a moral enterprise.

Then there was the less considered and stage managed response of someone watching on TV who made some instant comments on Twitter. This was not so reverential and certainly could be seen as offensive if one knew the player personally and were for some reason reading Twitter at the time of the incident. This provoked reaction from others on Twitter, almost all hostile, as far as I am aware, and somehow it got picked out from all the millions of other bits of irrelevant comment and inanity and the man who posted the offensive remarks was arrested and then sentenced to 56 days in jail.

To make a bit of a leap here there is plenty of stuff printed every day in the mainstream media that I take exception to, one could say I find offensive, and is presented with considerably more authority than a random Tweet. The BBC publishes their versions of events, usually without an editorial tagline, thus with no one as specific author, which I frequently totally disagree with. To make any comment that does not meet with their own editorial approval means it will not be published. I find their reverential attitude to sportsmen and women highly irritating. The fact that someone made one or two clearly ill judged comments on a platform that is not so closely policed and that were coming from a place much closer to reality of actual football banter was branded as something close to sacrilegious.

I am not saying all football banter is ’acceptable’ but it is what it is, it is outside of anything remotely like normal reasoned discourse. That is the whole point, and to somehow police it, while at the same time those in charge of the game and those who want to be associated with it for their own political reasons, mouth platitudes and cliché that are endlessly repeated, is a singularly pointless endeavour. Equally the term racist has become a crime on a par with GBH. Rabid footy fans will insult anyone in the opposing team strip, even if they have played five seasons for their own side previously, black or white. The fault lines are the colour of the shirt, primarily. And as for the football ‘community’ what is that exactly? Chelsea and Tottenham or Liverpool and Man United fans are obviously not part of a common community, that is the reality. It is a ridiculous use of the term that debases it as useful expression.

The fact that this is so is a poor reflection on the actual community. The absurd tribal allegiances that some people will adopt in the absence of anything better to believe in than a bunch of vastly overpaid, over-rated footballers who are no more than mercenary employees of privately owned companies trading under the brands of what were once football clubs are nothing to admire. To fiercely promote this rivalry and profiting from it and then turn around and be both sanctimonious and censorious is hypocritical in the extreme.