It will come as no surprise to any of you that I don't watch a lot of football. Not having any of the assorted pay TV methods the only stuff I watch on TV is whatever the BBC deigns to show me, which nowadays is exclusively FA Cup and Scottish Cup/League Cup games, plus the assorted highlights programmes for Scottish & English league games. To give you some sort of perspective, Gary Lineker's salary for Match of the Day exceeds what the BBC spends on the rights for Scottish football. The thing is though, I don't especially watch any of this out of any real sense of enjoyment out of football itself. I certainly enjoy watching football, but I mainly watch it because I have some vague sense of caring about the teams involved. For instance, the next game of football I watch will be a cup semi-final between one team
whose players literally quit in the middle of games and another whose name substitutes as a verb for spectacular failure, most recently seen
failing to win a game in which they were two goals and a man up with three minutes to go. At home. At least, I don't seek out football from other leagues/countries because there's no specific reason for me to. This is why I can remember very little about pretty much any football game I watch. I watched probably every match from the last four World Cups/European Championships, I could remember about ten incidents from all of them. Even Barcelona, the only notable thing I can recall from their recent years of dominance was the second leg of the Bayer Leverkusen tie in the Champions League where Messi scored five or something and looked like he was playing against children.
This relative dearth of actual legitimate experience watching football - and being quite culturally pigeon-holed in what I do watch - has led to me holding an extremely idealised view of what football is and how it should be played. How a team should rock up looking like they did in the 1970s, plain shirts, black boots, all identical. Seas of humanity behind the goals (have you ever seen what the
Holte End at Villa Park used to look like?, no hideous pervasion of modern capitalism... anywhere, eleven local lads in every team who play football in a style so fluid and pure it melts the brain to actually watch it. A manager in a suit (always a suit) at the side who stands stoic, immobile for 90 minutes. Except from all the times he's unleashing countless profanities at his team. A team who all play fairly and in whatever genuine spirit of the game you want to concoct, honest sportsmen who would run through walls for everything they represent, their club, their fans, their shirt, their community, the game itself. In terms of the individual there's a few I've seen who manage to uphold the sort of attitude I want to see in a footballer - Zidane. Pirlo. Iniesta. The sort of players who seem to float about a pitch entirely of their own accord. They move at a pace, with an intention completely unrelated to everyone else around them yet completely commanding it. If you can look suave as **** with a beard and hair and a glass of wine while pinging 50 yard diagonals like Pirlo, all the better for it.
While this is all of course impossible, and while about ten minutes of highlights last night are nothing to base any sort of worthwhile upon, there's something compelling about this Atletico team that Simeone's crafted. I should hate all of it. An assortment of undoubtedly skilled players who turn into cloggers whenever necessary. Who harangue referees at every opportunity. Who react to any perceived infringement from the opposition with hysteria bordering on the absurd, typified best in Godin's reaction to Suarez's arm in his face. A pretty nasty looking eye, yes, but he's a big boy. No need for the lying prostrate on the ground kicking your legs. A manager who looks like a cross between a pitbull and a low-level mafia associate who partakes in all of the above all while waving his arms around at the crowd, who're in an awful stadium with two corners missing a mile away from the pitch, and who play Seven Nation ****ing Army after goals. Yet you watch the fans, you watch this team that doesn't stop, knows exactly what it's doing and does it with an application and a determination which I've never seen in any predominately attack-minded team... it's remarkable. I'm very hesitant to call it intoxicating, but what a thrill it must be to witness. A shame it's all bad and wrong and should be criticised at every opportunity.
Like I said, if Suarez's was intentional then that's the best acting job ever. In that case he should have been sent off, but again I don't think it wasn't intentional. Neymar's is borderline and if you send him off there then you send off Godin for the afters, regardless of which Godin should have been sent off anyway. In fact he could have been sent off as early as the 32nd minute, but the ref would have never done that anyway. If you're going to send Iniesta off, which is also debatable unless you want to actually make a case, you also send off Gabi which also didn't happen not to mention the ref didn't even correctly award the penalty there. That's not to mention Koke. So if you want to talk about ref protection then get the record straight, but considering your laughable commentary on this subject along with everything else you choose to comment on I would suggest you put the mouse away for a while.
