Football's Not Ballet

[fearnsey]

Football's Not Ballet: Let's Get Dirty

Tuesday October 26 2004

Are a lot of modern footballers total wusses? Oh yes. You know it's true. Is it ruining football? You bet it is.

There is nothing more deeply embarrassing in modern football than seeing players getting all sulky and annoyed when the opposition decides to get a bit physical with them. Time was that anything apart from removing someone's kidneys with your boot was all regarded as all part of the rough and tumble of football.

And despite getting kicked all over the pitch for 90 minutes, most of our most successful sides from the 60's to the 80's got through a season by playing no more than 16 players or less - 42 league games a season plus another 25 or so in cup games that were played like they mattered.

So how did this happen? How did we go from an era of manic stamping, hacking and kneeing in the dangly parts where few players were injured for long, to the contemporary era where most players can't get through a run of ten games without something breaking snapping or straining.

People say the game is much faster now - which it is sometimes, though it's not always true, especially once you get away from the top five or six. But even if it was true, the game is played on good pitches these days, and physiotherapy is now a fine art. This should balance out the exertions of running around really fast.

Back in the 70's we played on pitches that were routinely hard with frost, or a ploughed field of clay or sand, both of which were guaranteed to give you pain all over your body. Physiotherapy involved taking aspirin, having a cold sponge inserted into you or being rubbed with hot soap by a sexually-repressed ex Sergeant Major type. That was it.

There was the occasional leg snappage and the odd hole in the heart, but by and large most players played most of the time.

They were stronger and harder. They had to be. They certainly came from more robust working-class stock. Out of the mines, the shipyards and steel factories and onto the pitch.

Are today's players a bunch of wusses? Yes. But we all are. It's symptomatic of how we live now. We all have it dead easy compared to a generation or two ago. Which is fair enough.

When I was a kid we had outside bogs, we had no central heating, we were routinely beaten by sado-masochistic teachers, paedophiles were just called dirty old men, racism was rife, the unions fought to keep non-white people from getting jobs on the docks and we lived off a diet of potatoes, stringy brown meat and soggy boiled vegetables.

Most people didn't have cars so we walked everywhere or got a bus which was so choked with smoke that your skin turned yellow if you sat upstairs. None of these things are desirable, even if they were character-forming. There's only so many years you want to wake up with frost on your bed. You had to be hard to get through. You had to be tough.

These days I swan around the house in me undies all year round and don't get cold. I eat delicious exotic foods from all parts of the world and sit in air-conditioned luxury in me BMW which has an onboard computer bigger than the ones that sent rockets to the moon at NASA...

Life is frankly a piece of piss in terms of physical comforts for most of us, so it's not surprising that footballers brought up in a softer world and pampered with giant wads of cash are simply not as tough as their forefathers.

And maybe that's fair enough, but the modern footballer has not only gone physically soft, he's gone mentally soft - and that's the bit I can't really stand.

This was well illustrated on Sunday when the Arsenal players and their manager came off whining about how they'd been kicked around a bit. complaining the game was physical. They were so upset they started throwing pizza and soup around. Oooh you rotters. Get her. Don't splash me, you beast.

This isn't something exclusive to Arsenal by any means, it happens all the time. Every club has its whiners. Its soft boys. The precious ego-fuelled darlings who think they're both the dog's bollocks and the dog's c**k. We all know who they are, even within our own clubs.

It's as though these players can't believe that someone has dared to touch their precious selves. Their egos get so inflated that they believe they're untouchable, quite literally.

For all of Thierry Henry's massive talents, he really does seem to believe that he is sullied by contact with another man on the pitch. That a player who kicks him or pushes him around is somehow an oaf who is a lower life form. He has perfected the "I can't believe you didn't just let me run past you like everyone else" look of astonishment as someone tackles him and kicks him into touch.

Perhaps this explains his often anonymous form against top teams - they know how to unsettle and maybe even scare him.

Perhaps this is an old-fashioned ugly northern view but I don't believe football is ballet, even if the laws of the game have been altered to try to make it more contemporary dance than physical sport. I think being a bit hard and a bit dirty is all part of the game and without it, it loses some of its passion and appeal.

You can outlaw the worst aspect of it like stamping on heads, biting off ears and actual shooting with semi-automatic pistols but the game is nothing if no one tackles or hussles. It's boring. It's Harlem Globetrotters type football. It lacks soul without physicality.

Perhaps that's why crowds have started to decline in numbers and it's certainly why so many crowds are so quiet. I have never heard our temples of football be so silent for so long in so many games. Even Anfield, which used to be a citadel of visceral human emotion, has gone quiet. Watching Liverpool play Charlton on Saturday, at times you could hear the coaches shouting like it was a practise match. There was no passion or excitement for long periods of time. The fans were bored. It's wrong.

The best players combat the rough stuff with superior skill and thinking. The ones who get upset are easy meat for the journeymen who hussle and hassle them. Can there be a worse insult to a player than the words "he was marked out the game by Phil Neville"?

Neville doesn't have 25% of the skill of Henry but he stopped him and Reyes playing on Sunday by superior broad knowledge of the game. By doing a job well.

Football isn't all about what you can do with the ball but the modern obsession with skill on the ball has accidentally led to the loss of the real red meat of the game and without it, too often games are anaemic and uncommitted.

The fact that fighting between players has been replaced by food fights suggests we've got a long way to go to get the game back to the physical, aggressive working-class roots that made the game so internationally popular and made it so universally exciting.

[beachesl]

Four Yorkshiremen Sketch

Monty Python

Four well-dressed men sitting together at a vacation resort.

Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.

Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?

Terry Gilliam: You're right there Obediah.

Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?

MP: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

GC: A cup ' COLD tea.

EI: Without milk or sugar.

TG: OR tea!

MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.

EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

TG: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."

EI: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.

GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!

MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TG: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope..

[canso]

E's got a good point ya know! Where's the next Roy Keane or David Batty gonna come from? Who's gonna get the crowd fired up with a shattering tackle a la Paul Ince? Was there ever a more lovable lunatic than Big Duncan Ferguson, who once was banned for giving his marker a "Glasgow kiss" that knocked him out cold? Even Zidane knows how it's done when the going gets rough! Not enough violence and characters who can bring the game into disrepute anymore, who's the honest hooligan supposed to relate to?

[Danny Boy]

Even Vinny Jones has gone soft....he's all Hollywood now.

[DJT]

quote:Originally posted by beachesl

Four Yorkshiremen Sketch

Monty Python

Hehe, we were thinking similarly, except for me it was a Grandpa Simpson rant.

[JayWay]

quote:Originally posted by canso

E's got a good point ya know! Where's the next Roy Keane or David Batty gonna come from? Who's gonna get the crowd fired up with a shattering tackle a la Paul Ince? Was there ever a more lovable lunatic than Big Duncan Ferguson, who once was banned for giving his marker a "Glasgow kiss" that knocked him out cold? Even Zidane knows how it's done when the going gets rough! Not enough violence and characters who can bring the game into disrepute anymore, who's the honest hooligan supposed to relate to?

We've already got him in Steven Gerrard.

[Soju]

What about the Savager?

[runner]

When I were a lad...

Norman Hunter (Leeds) Tommy Smith (Liverpool)Dave Mackay (Spurs)

were the hard men. I would like to think that any of the above would have had Savage for breakfast. The only modern day player I can think of that comes close is Keane. However, I am sure when they were at they were playing the like sof my Dad would have been saying how sof tthey were in comparsion to the hard nuts of the fifties

[canso]

Savage is a girly man!

Here's a team I'd go to war with, based on guys that I've seen play:

GK - Schmeichel (would you argue with him?)

LB - Pearce (PSYCHO!!)

CB - DeVos (Captain Canuck, brave and big hearted)

CB - Repka (would tackle the tea lady if she got too close)

RB - Puyol (Heavy Metal fan, not afraid to bang heads!)

DM - Ince (Guvnor loves the noise guys make when he cuts em down)

DM - Keane (scary, even from the safety of behind a TV set)

AM - Zidane (who says tough guys don't dance!)

AM - Gerrard (if only he'd stop pullin his groin!)

ST - Sparky Hughes (never backed down from a challenge)

CF - Duncan Ferguson (the man I'd most want backin me in a pub brawl)

On the Bench: Ollie Kahn, Julian Dicks, Colin Hendry, Paolo Montero, David Batty, Alan Smith, Franco Begbie (just in case it gets ugly)

[canso]

Savage is a girly man!

Here's a team I'd go to war with, based on guys that I've seen play:

GK - Schmeichel (would you argue with him?)

LB - Pearce (PSYCHO!!)

CB - DeVos (Captain Canuck, brave and big hearted)

CB - Repka (would tackle the tea lady if she got too close)

RB - Puyol (Heavy Metal fan, not afraid to bang heads!)

DM - Ince (Guvnor loves the noise guys make when he cuts em down)

DM - Keane (scary, even from the safety of behind a TV set)

AM - Zidane (who says tough guys don't dance!)

AM - Gerrard (if only he'd stop pullin his groin!)

ST - Sparky Hughes (never backed down from a challenge)

CF - Duncan Ferguson (the man I'd most want backin me in a pub brawl)

On the Bench: Ollie Kahn, Julian Dicks, Colin Hendry, Paolo Montero, David Batty, Alan Smith, Franco Begbie (just in case it gets ugly)