Some bloke once said something like “It’a funny old game football”.
Now, I can’t quite remember who it was, but but as I get older, I can’t help but see the truth in that statement with ever ever clearer eyes. Which is ironic, because my vision, frankly, is disappearing faster than a train down the Channel Tunnel.
Anyway, it does strike me that to take a proper interest in a football team, you must be a proper masochist, albeit one with a sense of humour. I mean, it’s different if you go to games I think, but as someone who’s become more of a television watcher over the last couple of seasons, essentially all you’re signing up to do is shout at your telly for two hours. Like on Sunday.
Unless, that is, you become so frustrated and then bored by what you’re seeing that you, essentially, switch off. To be clear, I don’t mean literally, switching off, though I have done so.
That’s no way to spend a life, is it? Of course, on Sunday, relief came via Tyler Blackett’s studs, on other days though, last Monday for example, we are not always so lucky.
Why do we do it?
My theory is, and this won’t be for those who take this game far, far too seriously, is that we watch football knowing that it it’s ridiculous.
It isn’t just about the euphoria of, say, Andrei Arshavin’s late winner against Barcelona. Neither is it just so that us men, us big macho men (full disclosure: I am by no means a big macho man, ask Jo), have something to talk about down the pub. After all, we’ll always have music, most of us at any rate.
Well, maybe that is part of it, I suppose.
Who can you share the ridiculousness with, if not your mates down the pub?
Let’s face it, there’s been plenty of it just in the last few days. Things that you have to laugh at, otherwise they’d make you scream. Things that, if you tell your girlfriend, or maybe your boyfriend about, they will manage to raise a polite smile. If you’re lucky.
That said, there are also things that even someone who doesn’t know, or care, what a football is will find funny. There’s no other way.
Like Cesc Fabregas’s hilarious sending off on Monday night. Ok, yes, they won the league title so it means little in the grand scheme of things. My immediate reaction to this act so ‘playgroundy’ it feels like Cesc’s official graduation as a Chelsea player, was that it was a characteristically laser guided football Fabregas sent onto Chris Brunt’s head. It was also really, properly, let me watch it again and again and again, funny. I found myself wishing he’d done it against us.
If he had, he’d have surely broken the internet.
He’d likely have also incited a riot and been lucky to leave the stadium alive.
So that was Monday night. On Monday evening, Sunderland Ladies announced that they had reported our own Kelly Smith to the FA.
Kelly, you will be aware, recently suffered torn ankle ligaments as a result of a tackle from Sunderland’s Abby Holmes. Having kept her counsel for a while, Kelly went public with her beliefs that Holmes tackle was malicious and designed to hurt, adding that Holmes was not good enough to play football.
Kelly, remember, is the one who is sidelined for the next four months.
Yet she is the one being reported to the FA, who have “reminded her of her responsibilities”. What these responsibilities actually are is unclear, presumably, it’s to take a potentially career ending injury on the chin and keep her mouth shut. To add literal insult to literal injury, Holmes is considering taking legal action against Kelly.
I realise in writing this, that there’s nothing funny about Kelly’s injury and, obviously, I wish her a speedy recovery. It seems ridiculous, though, that one player can injure another and then, should the victim dare to get a bit uppity about having their leg mangled, consider suing the victim.
We’ve been here before I think, let’s call it Shawcross Syndrome.
That the game’s governing body only get involved to reprimand Kelly says much about where they feel their priorities and, er, “responsibilities” lie.
As I said earlier, you can only laugh.
The Arsenal men have been involved, or been party to a whole load of hilarity over the last week and a half.
Of course, how hilarious you find this stuff, as I said earlier, depends on how seriously you take your football.
On Sunday, we got a belated repayment for Kieran Gibbs own goal which saw Manchester United take the lead at our place last year despite not having had a shot on target. Tyler Blackett’s own goal rescued a point for Arsenal, all but ensuring third place and no Champions League qualifier for the boys in red and white.
That was pretty funny, but not quite as funny as hearing Louis Van Gaal’s “Dear fans..” address to the Old Trafford crowd after the game whilst thousands of Gooners did a pretty good job of drowning him out.
I hear the man with the weirdest head in football has since surpassed himself, but hey, everyone does silly things when they’re drunk, right?
Last Monday saw a particularly benevolent Arsenal side treat old boy Lukasz Fabianski to an extended catching practice session in front of 60,000 people.
Headlines along the lines of “Fabianski returns to haunt Arsenal” were easy to write, but not particularly accurate. Arsenal’s crap finishing is what haunted Arsenal last Monday, if they’d bothered to shoot to the side of the Pole, well, they might have scored.
The hilarity factor – yes, I can laugh about it now – was increased three minutes from time. Montero’s cross headed towards goal by Bafetemi Gomis. Only, because Gomis didn’t head the ball straight at the goalkeeper, but to the side of him, David Ospina made a right pig’s ear out of it and allowed the ball to cross the line.
Ospina was, of course, only in goal because Wojciech Szczesny appears to have had some sort of breakdown and lost his spot in the team in January. This is the same Szczesny (or is it?) whose impressive form last season nailed the coffin shut on Lukasz Fabianski’s Arsenal career, leading Fabianski to the valleys and, ultimately, to last Monday’s shut out.
For what it’s worth, I’m convinced Szczesny would have saved that header. It, truly, is a series of events that would confound the narrator of Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece, Magnolia. Haven’t seen that? Check it out!
You can go back through game after game and find things to laugh at.
Some are obvious, Adebayor’s ‘saw it coming before the game even started‘ red card when Spurs lost 5-2 at our place for the second time in a year (itself a thing of great hilarity).
Some only become funnier as time goes by. Like the memory of thousands of Gooners greeting each Manchester United goal in that infamous 8-2 victory with “We love you Arsenal, we do” in an act of open defiance and… well, love.
It barely seems possible that I was there that day, but I was and, as my boss said to me at the time, “You’ll laugh about it one day”.
Well, it’s taken nearly four years, but here we are … I guess my message is, try not to take football too seriously, guys.
It’s not meant to be.
If it was, then what’s the point of Mike Dean or, for that matter, the FA?