Christmas Crackers 2019 #1 – Why football is not stunning.

I am stunned by the overuse and  erroneous deployment of the word ‘stunning’. Yes I am lying nearly dead in a ditch with shock, flopping like a penguin who after a bad dose of crystal meth fell from a cliff fell into some electricity pylons and is babbling in tongues while trying to make sense of it all. I am not really stunned though – I am just sitting here typing on my keyboard in a fairly measured way, but its important to go with the times.

Football uses the word stunning the most and I hate them for it. ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh what a STUNNING goal!!!’ the endless-loop-robo-footie-pundits screech as people lurch about in the stands as though the rapture has begun and they have just discovered that they are on the ‘saved’ list. What on earth is going on here?

Picture the life of a professional football striker – they get picked up as children by the big clubs because they are obviously much better than their peers at kicking balls into nets. Over time only those who can most reliably kick balls into nets are retained – they practice every day with professional trainers to get better at kicking balls into nets, they watch videos about it, they are attended to by expert physiotherapists, sports psychologists, dietitians, former kicking balls into nets experts and then compete ruthlessly with their peers to be best at kicking balls into nets. Finally they make the grade – they are hired as professional kicking balls into nets people – they have no other role in the team or at the football club. Strikers don’t help out with a little secretarial work, sell pies at half time or cut the grass – no they just kick balls into nets, or try to. 

It’s not like kicking balls into nets is at all unusual in the Premier League – it happens with monotonous regularity every week and month – year after year. In the last 26 years there have been on average 1100 goals scored every single season – so it is not all surprising that balls continue to be kicked into nets, in fact its monotonously repetitive with the same handful of wealthy teams scoring most of them. Its not stunning – its boringly predictable!

How hard is it to kick a ball in a straight line and quite fast anyway? A goodly chunk of the goals take a deflection, some of them are just wild hoofs of the ball in the general direction that just happen to go in, loads of the shots miss and hit row z in the stand.

But however hard it is – that is their fucking job isn’t it? There has to be some skill to it – but there is in all professions isn’t there? I don’t buy replica hi-vis vests and go ‘yeeeessssssssss!!!’ when a bloke I have hired to fix my guttering, whose profession it is to fix guttering and who is pretty good at fixing guttering – finally manages it as part of what he does week in week out all year round – no – I just say ‘cheers mate’ and ‘do you fancy a cuppa’. He is not expecting me to buy a season ticket and to call it ‘stunning’.

I wouldn’t mind so much if quite so many of the footballers didn’t look so bored with it themselves. I understand their position, kicking balls into nets and tiresomely back and forth between themselves is what all they do all the time – what is all the fuss about? When the most proficient ball kickers in the land finally manage to hoof one into a net – this is no cause for surprise or alarm – I don’t lie electrified with shock when the best runners win marathons or when a sheep dog is good at herding sheep.

No wonder there is a deathly weariness and cynicism to many football pundits – they are so bored and unimpressed with watching professional ball kickers kick balls about that they have to take industrial quantities of speed to maintain the requisite fever pitch of excitement. Its a brutal slavery over their emotions that they have to maintain a never ending fever pitch of STUNNERY – the banal cycles of pathos and euphoria must be ever more important and meaningful. 

What is it about the endlessly repetitive groundhog days of football that are stunning? Nothing. It is all utterly predictable. We should stop calling it stunning. Commentators should just say ‘Rashford has just scored a goal –  he did that last week as well – whatever’

Residents of northern cities with chronic problems of homelessness, child poverty and crumbling public services hand over fortunes to watch people kick balls into nets every week. Top football stars in Manchester and Liverpool replete with boredom, super cars and £200k a week are called ‘heroes’ if they finally manage to kick a ball properly – something they have dedicated their entire lives to for selfish gain…now THAT is stunning.