What an evening. I’m thoroughly thoroughly unimpressed. I try to avoid talking about football too much. It has always been my dirty little secret in a way. Dirty secret when I’ve been a traveller hanging out with alternate types, be those hippies or anarchists, the multimillion pound world of Premier League football hasn’t entirely fit in with the image or the ideals. We just talk about something else in those moments, but if you want to talk about football I’m all ears.
Football fans are on the whole incredibly annoying. This is generally because not only do they all have an opinion but the majority are wrong and they’re usually wrong because they’re idiots. That sounds harsh but I suggest you take five minutes to read comments on message boards, Twitter or the like. Imagine all the frustrating things that people say about politics and the important issues you care about, convert that to football, multiply the stupidity by at least two and realise it’s on something that on the whole isn’t important which makes it all the worse. But it is important because it is something we use to distract us from our drab existences and as a result can have a huge bearing on our mental state for at least the rest of the evening and likely the morning too when thanks to the excessive coverage online we have to digest the night before once more.
It’s a new season and my team lost. I’m sure that’s obvious. It is unsurprising in a way because we were less match fit than the opposition as our first game was postponed but still they were better. We weren’t good enough. The second goal was a penalty that should never have been given. We now have video assistant referees in football and they were supposed to cut out the controversy but they still get too many decisions wrong for it to be deemed a success. It is early technology and can improve of course but it seems just as inconclusive and debatable, the only difference is the arguments have changed. The only thing people seem to agree on is the passion it has taken out of the game as people instinctively hold back their celebrations by twenty percent in case something is disallowed.
Anyway video technology or not we lost. One silver lining is it puts pressure on our inept board and owners to spend some of the clubs vast wealth and stop being so incompetent with transfers. I use inept in the way I do to describe Tory politicians, shall we just say devilishly genius and self-serving to the detriment of all others? Either way the pressure is now firmly on to buy the players we’ve dithered over buying all summer. Being incisive may cost a little more but I don’t give a shit. It’s not my money and the clubs already badly run for how it should be, it means nothing to me if they spend an extra ten million here or twenty there. It doesn’t mean anything really, it’s just numbers to the idiot fan like me. Hopefully this will be a boot up the arse as the club need it. We invest so much energy and emotion into football. I don’t know why we do it to ourselves.
Observations and Misunderstandings 