The Beautiful Game my Ass

I am about to commit football heresy.  The probability of me forcibly taken from my bed and sold into a crazed form of modern day slavery in some backwater cesspool like Mogadishu or College Station will grow with each sentence I write in this post.  The scarilege, the sheer beauty of scarilegious dribble.  I tempt the gods here, for if not careful I will be villified as if I had just pissed on the grave of a Heysel victim in a crack induced rage.

There are  cliches in any sport, we live off them on a daily basis.  Ask any fan to recite them and invariably you will be witness to some poor fool reciting a string of accepted postulates that sound as if they have been down from previous generations as if spoken by the Metatron itself.  One that surrounds football, is that it is the “beautiful game”.  That phrase crops up in any discussion one has about the game.  And I for one find it wholly unsuited to the game.  There is nothing beautiful about this game, it is brutal for all those involved.  Anyone assoiciated in any form, whether directly or obliquely has doomed themselves to years of anguished pain.  Take for instance the tackle.  When done properly the football faithful will gush over it’s sheer beauty, placing it along some sublime plane of existence like virginal female genitalia.  When in reality it is the ultimate expression of beastial man.  It is the footballer saying this is mine not your’s, you have no right to the ball.  Even the mere act of scoring is an excercise of brutish human endeavour.  Kicking may very well be one of the original violent expression mankind must have felt after puching.  And in football the very act of scoring involves the athlete producing as much force and torque possible to propel that glorious round ball past someone who tries everything possible to prevent the ball from getting by.  There are primal atavistic undertones to this game.  Even the man who coined the phrase was once involved in one of the most memorable and brutal matches in the annals of the game, the infamous Battle of Berne.  It is a game where over a long season there is only one champion, and three teams that get demoted to the purgatory of a lower division, and with that comes the pain of being singled out as being less than 17 other teams.  Even to play the game it is a matter of running constantly for over 90 minutes with hardly a let up, no time outs no true respite in relation to the amount of running, chasing, grunting, heaving, and strain upon the human body.  When watching the game I see nothing that is beautiful, nothing artistic.  What I see is the physical and emotional strain of one group trying to impose their dominance over another group.  And in all certainty I will never ever get sick of watching that particular drama unfold.  I’m an addict, and already I can hear the footsteps as they come for me.