Wednesday May 5, 2004
The Guardian


Why I'm not singing any more ...

Football is a childish pursuit. This is the game's charm and its limitation. Sadly, football knows no bounds these days. In any given newspaper - excepting, I suppose, the Financial Times - there will be dozens of pages given over to inevitably repetitive coverage of football, and perhaps a couple to world news. Things are out of kilter. What used to be an escapist activity has become inescapable.
To take one of many examples: in the month after September 11, BBC Radio 5 Live cut away from a breaking news story about the possible hijack of a plane to go live to Manchester for a press conference in which David Beckham gave the slightly twitchy audience the benefits of his thoughts on England's chances in a forthcoming World Cup qualifier against Greece.

As a sports journalist for the past 15 years, this distorted coverage should have played into my hands. Instead, it merely depressed me. You don't have to interview too many moderate central defenders before concluding that both of you are wasting your lives. They have nothing to say; you have nothing to ask.

There are only so many ways of scoring a goal and I have seen them all. It is wearisome to be told by Gwyn Williams, Ken Bates's sidekick at Chelsea while it was still a publicly listed company, "There's media and there's media. I'm not going to argue about it." We were only discussing whether it might just be possible to talk to his employer's right back. "The answer is no," he continued, before bizarrely adding, "You make your own beds."

Nor is it possible to take refuge in other sports, for they have all been blighted and swamped by football. A Sunday Times sports editor once told me that the three most important sports in the country were "football, football and football". And that was more than a decade ago. Now sports coverage is completely monomaniacal. The Prem, more of the Prem and - why not? - a little bit more of the Prem.

Given so much space it is inevitable that writers should need to fill it with infantile exaggeration. In the past few weeks, one of the many sports writers of the year (for a country in the grip of blame culture we seem to be spending a lot of time giving each other awards) wrote: "For a tolerant, multiracial society, we need to thank [Ron] Atkinson more than just about anyone else," before going on to describe him as "the father of the racially tolerant society". This after one of the ex-manager's former defenders admitted to being surprised to hear he had used the word "nigger", because he'd only ever heard him say "coon" before.

Elsewhere, a highly visible columnist argued that sport was superior to any other art form because it "does not suffer from the paradox that the more popular something is, the more devalued it becomes ... If it's done well, everyone applauds". Criteria which lead ineluctably to the shaky conclusion that any run-of-the-mill pre-school children's entertainer is superior to Lucian Freud. Because there hasn't been a single hand clapping recently in the gallery at the Wallace collection, whereas a four-year-old will cheer anything. The clapometer as cultural arbiter. Jesus.

It is currently fashionable to write pretentious pieces - God knows I've done it myself - about the excellence of modern sports-writing. In such pieces it is obligatory to provide some historical and literary heft by alluding to the fact that both Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon started as sports-writers. That's true, but the crucial word is "started". Both did write about sport, but both grew up and moved on to other things. Lardner, according to his biographer Johnathan Yardley, turned away from baseball aged 34 because "he wearied of the stupidity of so many of the game's fans". And he never had to listen to a phone-in on TalkSport.

In a reverse of this process, many elderly British gents, who hitherto have professed no interest in the game, have started to pick up on it in their dotage. None more amusingly than William Ress-Mogg who, while on a family holiday in Cornwall last year, wrote a piece for the Times on "the great topic of the day. Will David Beckham go to Spain?"

Citing "Real Madrid's indifferent recent performance in Spanish League football" (as it happens, they were top of the league at the time), Moggy decided that Beckham (whom he compared to Diana, Chaplin and Nelson, and suggested "subconsciously uses Bill Clinton's method of triangulation") should probably not go to Spain.

No matter; this summer when the "great topic of the day" promises to be "Will David Beckham come back from Spain?" Rees-Mogg can have another crack at the 500 call. In fact, Moggy was one third right in his comparisons, because there are similarities between Diana and Beckham. They have a cookery O-level between them yet their antics have dominated the media for 20 years and counting. They were made for each other, but sudden death prevented them from ever getting it together.

There was a time when I loved football - when I was six. I was introduced to the game by my father, and we spent many happy years watching Chelsea together. I took a childish delight in my team. Ossie, Hutch and Charlie Cooke were my heroes. Their performances affected my weekend. For my father the results were unimportant. He went to the game to have a laugh with his friends and enjoy his son's innocent pleasure.

Now I am the age that my father was when he first took me to a football match, I am perplexed that so many of my contemparies react to the game as I did as a six-year-old, rather than as my father did as a 40-year-old. You know the type: they arrive at work on a Monday morning in their replica shirt and baldly state: "Don't anyone mention what happened yesterday." What might this be, you wonder. A death in the family? A terminal medical diagnosis? No, it is simply that his team has lost a football match. This event, over which he has no control, will determine his mood and his conversation for the rest of the week. Until another Ford Soccer Sunday on Sky Sports One offers a chance for an improvement of sorts.

Despite appearing to be an adult, and, scarily, being allowed to vote, this person wishes to be defined by his football team. Ich Bin Ein Arsenal Fan. He has opted out of the complexities of human life and adopted a somewhat simplistic persona: Arsenal fan. Given the merest pause in the conversation he will pavlovically and rhetorically ask: "Three greatest Arsenal left-backs of all-time? Lee Dixon, obviously ..." His epitaph will be: "He watched football and read the sports pages." Each to their own, but it seems something of a waste and a retrograde step from half a century ago, when Albert Camus wrote: "A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."

For a reluctant football writer such people are anathema. Dispiritingly, they are also ubiquitous. In the end, the strain of their company became so great, the logistical demands involved in avoiding them so complex, that I took myself off to Norfolk to write a book.

The main character, Jimmy Stirling, is, of course, a disillusioned football writer who lives, of course, in Norfolk. There is possibly an element of autobiography in it, but the business of writing about Jimmy Stirling being a crap sportswriter, while myself continuing to be an arguably less crap sportswriter, became so confusing that truth and fiction became thoroughly merged.

Many events that were fictitious at the time of writing have since come true. Not because I am unusually prescient, but because football is boringly predictable. In an echo of the Ron Atkinson affair, a football manager says to the newspaper editor for whom he contributes a column: "You don't see many nig-nogs in management these days." The editor, not realising that the manager only talks about football, thinks he is referring to his newspaper and goes on the defensive, rather than sacking him on the spot.

Early in the book Stirling, in a effort to exit yet another football conversation, authoritatively states: "I don't want to go overboard, Derrek, but I honestly think The Arse are so fucking good I'd be amazed if they lost a single game this season." This has come to pass.

And serendipitously, the recherché hobby of dogging which provides the book's denouement - Norfolk, being flat and underpopulated, is a dogger's paradise - was given much welcome publicity when the former player Stan Collymore was caught indulging in the habit in March.

Obviously, the publication of a comic novel is most unlikely to dampen the breadth and extent of the prevailing national fervour. Football will continue to be a placebo for the masses. Phone-ins will be log-jammed, analysis will proliferate, and far from being only a game, it will continue to be, for far too many, the only game. Next month, God help the 72% of us who profess no interest in football, there is the European Championship. An inconsequential tournament that will be covered with the upmost gravity and with all the faux-patriotism that accompanies such occasions.

It is certain to be dismal. But if everyone could start to take football a mite less seriously, there is a slim chance it might become a degree more joyous. And if we are not able to derive any joy from such a childish thing as football, it is probably for the best that it be put away.