If anything summed up modern day football, it was the deafening sound of booing at Anfield yesterday after the worst Spurs team I have ever seen gained a deserved draw against an expensively assembled and wildly misfiring Liverpool side. I watch very little football these days and almost none live and in person. Yesterday reminded me why.
By my definition, if you do not actually go to their matches, you do not support a team. The only team I have supported was – note the past tense – Bristol Rovers. There will be no other. Once the football love affair of my life had cooled, caused by acrimonious off-the-field issues, it was not as if I would just choose another team to support. I am not saying that it is not possible to change the team you support: it was impossible for me to do so. My love for the Rovers ran far deeper than just turning up on a Saturday afternoon. I lived and breathed it for much of the rest of the week, too. I like Liverpool but I don’t love them and I am not a supporter. I just watch their games on telly.
Despite Sky’s typically over-the-top build up, Liverpool v Spurs was the dampest of damp squibs. Liverpool passed the ball endlessly until needlessly giving the ball away and every time Spurs got possession, they employed The Long Ball. Liverpool scored the only way they appeared likely to score, via a free kick that should never have been awarded, as their best player by miles Dominik Szoboszlai beat the poorly positioned Spurs keeper Vicario. Late on, Liverpool hate-figure Richarlison got the equaliser, the referee booed the players off and that was it. Cue big disappointment and a ruined weekend. But not for me.
The difference between supporting a team and liking one is, at least to me, massive. If some years ago the Rovers had drawn in similar circumstances, I’d have been bitterly disappointed, probably for the rest of the weekend. Now, I immediately switched channels to the golf. In any event, I had been so committed to Liverpool, I watched the game in between reading a book. The loud booing from The Kop just made me laugh. Fucking hell: Liverpool were absolute shite, for sure, but they are also fifth in the Premier League, currently in a qualification position for the laughably named Champions League. Indeed, they’re still in The Champions League and the FA Cup. I have a lot of time for the people of Liverpool in general and the supporters of LFC in particular, but the mass booing reeked of entitlement. For the majority of the game, Anfield was completely silent. In the first half, you could literally have heard a pin drop until Liverpool scored, when they briefly woke-up. No wonder Szoboszlai said afterwards he felt “flat”. If the atmosphere in the ground had been flat, it would have been an improvement.
If I am not invested in the only team I like, what of the rest of football? I rarely watch any other Premier League games because, why would I? Pep Guardiola’s luxury store bought robots leave me cold, Arsenal I actively dislike, Manchester United I actively dislike even more, especially as they are now partly owned by a racist tax-dodging billionaire, Big Jim Brexit. Why would I watch any of the other games? Sky spent a fair chunk of yesterday’s SUPER SUNDAY trying to persuade me to watch tonight’s Monday Night Football between – and I am nearly asleep just thinking about it – Brentford and Wolves. Honestly, I would not watch that game at gunpoint. Why would I watch a game between two teams I have absolutely no interest in? Surely, the whole point of football is wanting one of the teams you are watching to win? Except of course that since the advent of the Premier League in particular, football has been promoted far more as entertainment than a sport. I’ll tell you what though: if I can’t think of anything more entertaining to do or watch tonight than Brentford v Wolves, I may have to query my very existence on Earth.
It’s me who’s in a minority, though. Viewing figures for TV footy are holding up well and at most Premier League clubs there are colossal waiting lists for season tickets (it was 26 years at Liverpool but they’ve closed the list now) and it’s almost impossible to get a match day ticket. Ironically, Brentford, who tonight host Wolves, are the only club that does not have a season ticket waiting list, preferring instead a loyalty system. Come on lads: it will never catch on. Loyalty in football? You’ll be telling me next that all this badge-kissing from some players proves that they play for the shirt. Do they fuck.
In some ways, ‘my’ team, Liverpool, illustrate some of the things that are wrong with the Premier League, certainly in relation to the playing squad. They started yesterday’s game with one Englishman (the exciting 17 year old Rio Ngumoha), having flogged off most of their home grown talent in order to manipulate the profit and loss aspects of football (Manchester City have this down to an art form), they have put together the best part of half a billion quid’s worth of mismatched talent and are currently playing like they don’t really mean it. And why would you mean it if you were, say, Mo Salah, well into the autumn of your career (and doesn’t it show?) on a basic salary of around £500,000 a week? Anfield appears to feel like a heady combination of greed and entitlement at the moment. I am relieved that I can take it or leave it, win lose or draw and frankly move on to something far more interesting in my life.
I’ll care a bit more when the World Cup comes along, but even then not as much as I once might have done. Whereas my life was based around the footballing calendar, certainly for Rovers home matches, and I’d take into account the summer international tournaments when planning our sunshine holiday. No more. There are no sports bars where we are going this summer and spending quality time with my partner under a Canarian sun is far more important to me than watching hordes of millionaires kicking a ball around in fascist America.
I like Liverpool, I’d like to see them win something this year but it’s not the be all and end all. Then again, Liverpool never was the be all and end all for me. Rovers were and those days are gone forever, over a long time ago.
The Premier League. Overpaid, overrated and, unfortunatly, over here.
