One of the many valuable lessons life has taught me, is that when a group of people are people are engaged in a complicated fraud of some description, over a sustained period, intoxicated by their own success they believe it’s going to go on forever. They think they’ve got all the angles covered. They think they’re bombproof, because they’ve thought the whole thing through, over and over, and have provided for every conceivable eventuality.
And then something from outside, over which they have no control, and couldn’t possibly had foresight of, intervenes and the whole deck of cards collapses in the blink of an eye. And they’re fucked. It happens at bewildering speed.
We all like to think we’re in control, but we’re not; not really.
Football has quite possibly befallen the same fate. Something no-one could have predicted has intervened into a seemingly invincible sport in a way that makes its acolytes realise that it isn’t that important after all. That the first genuine hiatus in the sport (of over a few short weeks) in the last 60 or so years, will give people cause to reevaluate how important it is to them; make them appreciate that they haven’t missed the game as much as they'd feared.
The sport’s got a big challenge on its hands, which repeating the same message as hitherto, once we’re through the other end of this, simply won’t suffice.
The universe works in ways we cannot predict or control. This should be a lesson to football, as well as us all.
As John Lennon once said, life is what happens when we’re making other plans.