Cod Almighty | Diary
Thunderstorms ahoy
7 June 2017
Your original/regular Diary has been thinking about the place of football in our lives. I know – sorry. But like any other normal person, when there's death on the streets and the future of civilisation as we know it seems up in the air, I find it a challenge to give that much of a shit about potential replacements for the left-back who just left to sign for Doncaster Rovers.
Maybe it's not really the state of the world that fills me with weariness about the football. Maybe it's more the state of the football. I can't pass this summer choosing next season's fantasy team because it's years since I properly followed the Premier League and I don't know who any of the players are. I can't pass next summer watching the World Cup because of the blood-in-the-mouth taste of FIFA's corruption. And I can't even look at Town's newly superb new official website v4.0 without wondering why someone has decided to add the words "READ I" to the start of 54 per cent of the headlines.
Or maybe it's just me. Maybe I've got too much else going on these days. I don't know. I think I do reasonably well for an exile. I'm guessing I made it to about ten games last season. Then again, I had a season ticket for five or six years, and I was still an exile then. Some exiles get to nearly every game home and away. Maybe since having children, and all the truly disastrous life decisions like getting a job, the football has become just one thing among many in my life.
This reminds me of a theory put forward to explain the historical dominance of clubs from England's north-west over their London counterparts. Life in the capital offers more glamorous alternatives to the football, they say, while supporters in the industrial provinces, denied rival attractions, adhere to their clubs with a passion unseen in the sophisticated environs of Islington or Hammersmith. I can see something in this theory, but it seems far from watertight. If you're more likely to back your club to glory when there's fuck all else going on in your town, Champions League finals would be monopolised by 120,000 bellowing fans of Peterborough United and Stevenage.
I may have to leave shortly and attend to the panes of the greenhouse I'm sitting in, which have just been shattered by a series of projectiles launched from inside it.
Maybe it's just the ennui of the mid-table finish. But this was never a problem when we were young. You watched your team drift listlessly to 17th place, you shrugged and went back to school and administered relentless, life-destroying homophobic abuse to the least athletic boy in the year, egged on the dubious sociopath who passed as your PE teacher. Ah, the good old days. Back in 2017, accelerated culture has turned us into twitchy, overentitled, ADHD-ravaged morons, and we can't spend a fortnight outside the play-off places without completely losing our shit.
That's when we start using a phrase like "the worst performance in 40 years" to describe a 1-1 at home against Wycombe. Just as we used it to describe a 2-2 away at Altrincham about two years previously. And a 0-0 at Macclesfield a few seasons prior, and probably a home defeat against Preston at some point before that, not sure when, but comfortably less than four decades ago. We're like the boy who cried wolf. Except we're the boy who cried urrrr fuck's sake Town this is shit get it sorted Buckley or fuck off back to West Brom.
That's when we know we've got too close to it, and we need to take a step back, and probably look at the world again.
The thing is, though, if we all devoted our time to particular pursuits strictly according to their quantifiable practical value in the Grand Scheme Of Things, there wouldn't be any football in the first place. There'd be very little art and poetry, and all that would remain of music would be the type you hear in shopping centres. Those protein pills we used to hear about would finally get their chance to replace food, and the finest craft ales and single malt whiskies known to humanity would be superseded by a course of stress-relieving injections. There'd be no kissing, or peacocks, glitter, or looking at a cloud and seeing the shape of a sheep or a submarine. It wouldn't all be bad though, because there'd certainly be no golf.
It's precisely the irrational shit like the football, then, that makes life worth living at all. That's the stuff that defines us. In a world of seven billion people, we need it. We need it to mark us out as individuals, but we need it to connect with others too – to forge a sense of community, connection and belonging from our irrational but vital preoccupations and passions. Have your minute's silence and then crack on. The football is so important precisely because it is so unimportant. So who is Sladey going to bring in to fill Danny Andrew's boots?