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Sunday 9 May 2004

Football haters unite [lurks]

I was over at the Guardian and I spied this wonderful piece by a former football writer who has since seen the light. Here's an extract:

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.'

I'm in my own personal living hell at work. I'm surrounded by these simplistic personas. There's nothing else on the agenda, nothing else that defines them than commenting on the bizarre and expensive politics of swapping players and other dreary football shit which isn't even about playing football.
Fucking insane, make it stop for fuck sake. There must be a way we can implant some some additional personality into these people?!

19 comments:

  1. I'm fortunate; the football-followers in my team are greatly outnumbered by those who don't give a toss and they bloody well know that this makes them the boring geeks so they rarely talk about it.
    It's important for people to be passionate about something in their lives, and if its sport then fair enough. My personal pitch (ba-da-boom!) is that its what people have for a hobby because they can't be arsed to do anything more interesting or even challenging.
    (there are lots of exceptions here - people who play a lot of football, people who are brought up with it, people who live next to the stadium...etc)
    People who go to the pub and talk about football - well great pal, but don't you have any other contribution to make? Do you have any opinions on anything else?
    Myself... well I do like international football. Patriotic init :) Would be good to play as one kick-ass UK team and not little cliquey nations though!

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  2. Can I just say - read that article it's excellent. As to football orany other sport bore, it reminds me of the Hitchiker's Guide to theGalaxy - 'One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest tounderstand about human beings was their habit of continually stating andrepeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Ohdear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior.If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, theirmouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration andobservation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If theydon't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains startworking.'

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  3. I'm sure you never bore anyone on anything lurk. god bless ya.

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  4. It is a very good piece, even from the perspective of being some one who does watch football. oddly, i was sent the URL on a football mailing list earlier this morning... I believe there was a character on The Fast Show (John Thompson played him?) which made much the same point in a less lucid way. His point about the massive media overkill about football (and in fact even only a subset of the whole of 'football' ) is definitely valid. I don't give a toss about David Beckham beyond how well or not he performs when he's playing for England. Outside that he could sodomise geese for a hobby and I really, really wouldn't care.
    However, in balance I would say that people who define themselves purely on one aspect of their lives, whatever it may be, are in general all as equally boring as each other. There are football bores but there are also fishing bores EQ bores, golf bores, film bores.. Surely fixating one any one thing to such a degree is a sign of a dysfuntional mind? As Beej says 'Do you have opinions on anything else?' It's as much the monotheism of it as the subject that is irritating.
    His book sounds like a right pile of arse mind.

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  5. Me bore someone? Quite possibly but then the next they talk to me, I'd probably be talking about something else. Still that wouldn't help if it was a football bores, I'd probably be boring them by talking about anything other than their fucking dreary all-encompasing hobby. God bless ya indeed.
    For sure there are a lot of other bores although I don't seem to run into them very often. I guess you can avoid them really. I've got football fans for mates, for sure - but then they are equally happy to stray off the subject. You know, thinking men basically.
    That book does sound fucking arse, I admit :)

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  6. So you're saying conversational topics are partly determined by previous conversations? Obviously if they successfully talk about a common topic there's no reason for them to stop just because a minority is put off by it. It's a bit harsh on that minority I admit but bring up something more interesting and I'm sure they'll gravitate toward it. After all these are your work colleagues, you know thinking men basically. Unless your firm only hi

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  7. You think I fucking don't? You think that the 70 per cent of the fucking country that is bored fucking shitless by boring football cunts doesn't try to change the fucking subject?!

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  8. i have found that asking them why they are so excited about watching a bunch of sweaty men in close contact kinda shuts them up. course, it needs to be done kinda colorful. you can always trust that idiots got a greater homophobia than love for the game :)

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  9. 'sweaty men in close contact'? Are you sure you're not thinking of rugby? Or maybe Sumo?
    Can I just ask - anyone know where the '70% of the population hate football' stat comes from? I presume it's an assumption based on the probable statistic that only 30% of the population ever attend football matches. Which would be a pretty.. well, crappy interpretation basically. It's like saying 30% of the adult population must be gay because they aren't married.

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  10. I read it somewhere. And I mean since 50 per cent of the population are women, is it really so fucking difficult to believe?

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  11. I kind of find it difficult to believe it's not a lot higher. It's a game of revoltingly overpaid pansies running around without, generally, a neuron to rub between them, treating the whole pursuit like it's got some import. It hasn't. It's a pig's bladder full of air and two goals. I mean fucking really like.

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  12. Fooking reely loik!

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  13. God I hate football. It fucking sucks. Nuff said.

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  14. 22 grown men kicking a leather sack around a waterlogged field.

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  15. I've always felt like I'm a bit disabled because when my mates talk about footy I have no idea what they are talking about. I'll never forget Nic (who some of you know - shaved ginger head turns up at our evenings out sometimes) my friend from school and lifelong supporter of Chelsea screaming at a guy in the pub 'They are a cup team not a league team!'I'm thinking what the fuck does that mean?
    You have to take into account that I'm talking about people I repect. Several of them started the 'Boys own' football fanzine in the early 90's and went on to be well known DJ's and turn Boys Own into a record label etc etc, pioneering house music on the way
    They have all been into professional football violence in the past (which I dont condone and have argued with Nic about) and basically theyare people who have 'presence' shall we say.
    Interestingly I went to my first football match for 30 years last year (Southampton) and enjoyed it so much I'm just about to buy a season ticket.
    What I realised at that match, as I watched Robby Savage running around the field winding everyone up, was that football was, quite simply, entertainment, just like cinema, theatre or god forbid watching TV!

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  16. Robin, I'm already a saints season ticket holder. If you go in the future you should give me a call if you fancy a drink or something afterwards.

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  17. that all they talk about is football says nothing about the game, they'r simply simple minded people who seize up the first bit of info about shit and repeat it over and over. it works the same for all countries and all people and all sports. football is accually one of the smarter sports in the world. hell, look at american football. talk about sweaty men

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  18. too right. my dad's a phd in chemistry and plays soccer with a number of guys at his work. its also a jock thing to talk about the same fucking shit over and over and over

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  19. about god-knows whatever they cant change...

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