Football Season Cheer
I have to feel good. The football season’s back tomorrow.
Not many years ago, I wouldn’t have have anything to do with ‘the beautiful game’. Football was the domain of the tough kids at school who already had swastikas tattooed on their necks and membership forms to join the local ‘firm’ initialed by their parents. The crowd trouble of the seventies and eighties, the gang violence masquerading as club loyalty… none of this attracted me to a sport, which always seemed to be caked in mud, blood, and stale beer. It also put me off from looking at the game strategically; a factor I always look for in sport. I didn’t understand the meaning of 4-3-3 or 4-4-2 because, to be honest, it wasn’t something that seemed significant to what was going on between the two sets of goalposts. I don’t recollect is every being adequately explained. Football was Jimmy Hill, bad haircuts, muddy pitches, and crowd trouble. There seemed to be very little sport. It was hardly surprising that I became addicted to cricket from an early age. I put all my sporting prowess into learning the skills of inswining yorkers and off drives. Television explained the concepts behind the sport in a way that football would never get until Sky came along.
These days, I’m never happier than the first day of the Premiership season. I love the strategy, the rivalry between sets of talented players. I love to see new players establish themselves and the old players undergo a choice of scenarios taken from all the great classic dramas: heroes that rise, fall, or return. It’s all great stuff, but especially when Liverpool win.