When All Else Fails, Try Football

People who don’t like football (or any other team sport) just don’t get it. They assume that all that’s at stake is a game.  ‘What’s so special about twenty two grown men (or women) chasing after a ball?’, ‘there’s no need to get so worked up about it’, ‘it’s not a matter of life or death’ are but a few of the deprecating intonations muttered week by week by despisers of the beautiful game. Even the late, great Bill Shankly’s rejoinder that football is not a matter of life and death, ‘It is much, much more important that that’, fails to wash with them.

For those of us who happily admit our addiction, the game with its drama, passion, idiocy and nerve-shredding tension is not an escape from reality; it’s a journey to something that lies close to the very heart of what we are. It is war without the bullets, naked screaming loyalty given to an always willing, accepting and reciprocating icon of passion; it is visceral, tribal identification without the odium of political discrimination and social oppression. It provides an object of external devotion that requires the simplest of beliefs, devoid of philosophical and theological doubt. It is chess on grass, poetry in motion, an endless succession of theatres of dreams.

Lest anyone think that I am exaggerating; let me assure you that I am not. For those of us who are stricken with the glorious illness of being football fans, no cure is either sought or possible. All we ask for is your sympathy and the kindness of the odd cup of tea to calm our nerves.

There are, of course, other ways of getting in touch with the primal urges and emotions that football unleashes; there are other ways of touching the dark, hidden recesses of unsavoury antipathy and blood-curdling rivalry, but I suggest that there are few safer, healthier or less destructive ways of doing so.

What a shame that Hitler hadn’t devoted his energies into being a Bayern Munich fan, that football had not been invented to save Joan of Arc from the flames because rival French and English armies were too busy shouting themselves hoarse at a World Cup encounter between the two nations. What a shame that the flag waving jihadists in Iraq and Syria aren’t waving the flag of the Republik of Mancunia, or Chelski, or (and this is pushing it) leaping to their feet in the kop at Anfield.

At the end of a week when murder, discord, greed and political intrigue have once again dominated the headlines, I suggest that a lot of people could have done worse than to have tried a game of football.