I will admit that I'm greatly missing football. In ways that I'm only becoming aware of now, for more than fifty years the season has structured my winters. Even when I lived out in China and Japan in the early eighties, I glued my ear to the big short wave radio I'd taken out with me to find out how Billy McNeil was doing at steadying the ship (just looked up his record: it was better than I had remembered it) In summer I console myself with cricket, up to a point. I do have strong other interests, but as I say, football has structured life in my winters.
With all the junk stripped aside — the obscene amounts of money now involved, the baleful influence of UEFA, of FIFA, the Great God satellite television (all of these are linked, of course), the growing tendency for the administrators of our clubs to regard us as ‘customers’, whatever the fuck that means, the over-sanitisation of stadia since Heysel and Hillsborough (good and bad points can be argued, of course), the repulsive play acting that is second nature to all top level footballers these days, and now this new work of devilry, VAR — it is still the most simple, accessible and beautiful game that has yet been invented for human beings to come together on this planet. Two jumpers thrown down in a local park to make ‘nets’; or the massed tiers of a great stadium in full cry.
It is a game, and it is more than a game. Yes, I'm missing it.
