What is it about this particular game that makes otherwise sensible and rational people turn into fucking wingnuts?
Now the Voice of Treason is not a lover of the beautiful game. Never has been. So you can imagine how fucked off I get when the two guys that work on my floor start. All they ever do is talk about football. The premiership is their only conversation. Now I appreciate that they have a passion for the game. That's fair enough. My passion is to slaughter all the wee spidey fuckers in Ireland by poisoning the water that makes Buckfast and Old English cider, but I don't go on about it 24/7. So please, you football-mad melters, do me a favour and fuck up.
Then there's Italian soccer. It's getting interesting. The object of the game is not to put the ball behind the net, but to see how many peelers you can decapitate with a box of fireworks. This new 'Sicily-rules' game will be all the rage in Ballymurphy soon, you mark my words. It reminded me of a few years ago in North Belfast when every time there was a Old Firm game there were pitch battle riots in the middle of the streets. One set of cider-tached wasters (in green and white) getting stuck into another set of cider-tached wasters (in blue). They're probably the best of mates when they go to Corporation St dole office next day to sign on.
'Right Smickers, Saltic and Rangers is playing on Sunday, rite? Have the bricks and the petrol bombs waiting, cos 'em peelers is getting too crafty nigh, the fuckers'.
Give me a nice civilised game like Gaelic Football. In this discipline, the players do the fighting on the pitch, not the supporters. I wouldn't like to mention any names of course. Like Dublin. Or Tyrone.
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8 comments:
You forget Millwall supporters.
They put Islamic fundamentalists to shame.
You seem like an intelligent man, Voice. Then perhaps I could direct you towards Goldblatt's 'The Ball is Round: A history of World Soccer', in which it is clearly delineated how the GAA came into existence, and invented it's own version of football overnight, in order to prevent the popularity of Association Football developing in Ireland.
The end result has of course been a failure, as the lack of development of soccer in Ireland has meant that the vast majority of sports fans on this island follow teams in Britain instead, and even in Celtic Tiger affluence, good Irish players are still forced to emigrate.
After Hillsborough and 'Fever Pitch', many intelligent football fans were able to out themselves as both having a brain and wanting to enjoy their sport without being considered neanderthals for doing so.
It seems that these developments may have passed you by.
But soccer remains the global game, inspiring what Eamon Dunphy (otherwise a complete cnut) once termed 'shared experiences such as are so rare in the modern world' on a scale that no other activity or event can hope to match.
And in that context, 'Gaelic' football reveals the real meaning of its title - that errant version of football which was developed to generate and enforce an inward-looking, De Valera-esque backward vision of Ireland as some sort of Gaelic haven from modernity.
Of course it's possible that you're just being ironic, in which case, well done, you suckered me good.
But if you're not, you're just coming across as the sort of ill-informed, anti-sports intellectual who tut-tuts about manly pursuits while stroking his chin goatee and wondering why chicks don't dig his collection of rare Fifties jazz outtakes.
Soccer. I don't get it. Grown men running around in shorts, kicking a volleyball around with fans in the bleachers kicking the shit out of each other. Well at least it's not cricket(a game that you play for two weeks and noone wins). I have tried. I really have tried to understand soccer. I don't get it.
On 15 Feb. pitchers, DL players(injured) and catchers report to spring training camps and the rest must report by 27 Feb. Baseball, now that's a sport!
I'm not a footballing man at all, JC, and that includes the Gaelic variety. I like to take a look in at the hurling and the rugby every now and again though.
My problem is not with football per se, it's with the clampits who live and breathe it. I put them in the same league as stamp collectors, trainspotters and those who dig their rare fifties jazz outtakes. You know the bores who are so into their hobbies, they make people want to plot their untimely demise. It's just so tedious.
Rugby is also a football code, Voice. So you are a little bit of a footballing man after all!
Pedant! :-)
I guess you have to be a bit fluent in 'rugby talk' to get on in the NICS, though. ;-(
so THAT'S where I'm going wrong!
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