Super Sunday (but not for football)

As football seasons in western and central Europe reach crunch points, I can’t help feeling a certain ennui to the whole proceedings.  Even with the gobbets of highlights, the hype surrounding the ‘importance’ of matches is like a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes – why does it matter.  Undoubtedly, the severe medical issues that have afflicted Fabrice Muamba and Stilyan Petrov has brought this issue into sharp relief, that in harrowing times as these, football is just a game.  Yet when the clamour of identikit mournfulness (I’m thinking of TV presenters and radio hosts, rather than the players and family close to Muamba and Petrov) passes and it will pass, as the cycle of news is 24/7, why should football be exalted with such intense acclaim?  This is not to say my support for my own football club has drained away – I am interested even in things that might have a peripheral impact on the team, pondering imponderables.  This is, admittedly, overwhelmingly from a position of helplessness, yet the identification with a tribe is burned into the heart.  And from this there can be no clearer summation – apart from the odd  qualifying match and summer tournament, football is not the ‘national game’ but a mosaic of petty rivalries.  More divides us than unites us.

I used to enjoy the twists and turns of a season, the story being told.  The immolation of Wolverhampton Wanderers by their fellow itinerants Bolton Wanderers, thus effectively sealing the relegation of the former, should have been a stunning moment.  Yet I can’t summon up much more than ‘meh’.  The fightback by Manchester City from 3-1 down to draw 3-3 should have been exhilarating, though with even the mitigating impressive technique of the goals, it left me feeling jaded, just another statistic in a jumbled bunch of them.  What did strike me was the ‘fans’ leaving five minutes early and so missing the action that brought their club parity.  Following on from Rio Ferdinand’s remarks, I thought of them crawling back into the woodwork from whence they came now that their team was stuttering.

The footballing authorities embrace of a Sunday schedule puts me in the frame of mind that they are also looking to inculcate a new spirit within people.  The power-hungry Premier League did not need to be asked twice, but the Championship and the FA and League cups are also insinuating their way as far as possible into people’s lives.  I’m not a fan of Sunday games, believing it should be a day of rest, at the very least for families to take their minds off it, though I understand the demands of television.  But for the screening of Manchesters United and City on Easter Sunday, both ‘vital’ games, I think of my room-mate in Romania who posited that the authorities were trying to formulate a substitute to Christianity.  They overstepped the mark when forcing a game to be played on a Sunday morning, but the FA and PL have grown confident again.  I remember commentator Alan Green berating fans turning up late for a match on a previous Easter Sunday, thinking them having a lazy lie-in, it not occurring to him that they might have been at a church service followed by lunch.  A German friend of mine, not religious at all, was surprised that England does this on Easter, saying that German clubs respect the holiday by all playing on Easter Saturday (this was back in 2004; things might have changed).  If this is to try and fill an emptiness inside people, it will never succeed (personally, I think, quite the reverse), but as long as it fills coffers till their cups runneth over, it will continue.  It will not stop my interest in the melee surrounding my club continuing to diminish.