We see it every other summer: a letter from “Disgruntled in Tunbridge Wells” or some sour-faced harridan on Loose Women complaining about the proliferation of football on television. (Although it HAS also been done with humour – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF_uOgyBK1c ). Never mind the fact that we live in a digital age where over 500 channels can sate our apparent desire for 24 hour home improvement, makeovers or watching people we’ve never heard of playing poker, the popularity of the Beautiful Game really seems to get their goat. Apparently there really can be too much of a good thing. Perhaps 2012 really is the year the world will end because, whisper it, I think I actually agree with them this time.
I’m talking, specifically, about Olympic football. For me the Olympics is all about bringing together disparate but exciting sports that are oft-ignored during the preceding three years. It celebrates sporting excellence and human endeavour whilst also embracing the bizarre. After all, the inspiration from the Games comes from the Ancient Greeks who, before they took up running up gargantuan debt and rioting as their favourite pastimes, got their kicks from running around butt naked. Now, I’m not advocating a return to that kind of behaviour (naked long jump and starkers pole vaulting just doesn’t bear thinking about), I’m just saying that football already has its platform: let’s leave the Olympic podiums for the hammer throwers and the beach volleyball players.
At the very least football should follow the example of boxing, where only amateurs can compete in the Olympics. Now that would be interesting. Forget a team of kids, marshalled by a snail-paced David Beckham: I’d pay decent money to see Team GB’s Dog & Duck 2nd XI doing battle with a team pulled together from a Rio de Janeiro favela. Hackney Marshes. Jumpers for goalposts. Oranges at half time and 15 pints of frothy beer afterwards.
Ian McDougal, Scotland’s finest pub player, cuts an imposing figure…
That way we could avoid the embarrassment of trying to get the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish football associations to join forces in what would be the most uneasy alliance since, well, any of Joan Collins’ marriages. And with Euro 2012 also in the calendar this summer, surely seeing my country getting embarrassed playing the sport we created just the once is enough? So, two fingers to Olympic Football. Let’s bring back Olympic Tug-Of-War instead.
We might even win at that…
The Celery Terrorist
