Enough with the misplaced snobbery towards football

The Ashes are done. Let me summarise; what a series! England ride Bazball bronco but take two tests to bring it under control. Lord’s. Disgrace. But for whom? Manchester. Rain. Shock. Something must be done! Same scribes; not playing future tests in the north is an insult. Stuart Broad, Ashes warrior. Fairy tale ending. Ben Stokes. English sporting great. Pat Cummins – nice chap, credit to his nation. Series drawn. England moral victory. (Records stubbornly fail to recognise these).   

You are, as they say in commercial radio, up to date. 

The consensus has been well rehearsed across five tests and six weeks and is, in large part, hard to dispute. Now for the next one. One that always follows any sporting event over which the middle classes lay natural claim and in which the right sort has done very well. 

You will be familiar with the pattern. Rowers, rugby players, anything involving alpine sports and particularly girls from the Home Counties, cycling, cycling couples, pretty girls who win one-hit-wonder tennis grand slams, plucky yachters. Their victories are not just triumphs of human endeavour and sporting skill. Their triumphs do not stand merely as one in the eye for all those too eager to talk their country down. No. They are champions for the right sort of people. 

And, to ensure the wrong sort get the message, mandatory columns ensue in which unfavourable compare and contrasts are scribed about football, home of the barely articulate, underachieving oik. Unless, of course, we’re talking about multi-lingual foreign players who combine attractive accents with intriguing philosophical asides. They’re very different. 

That Ben Stokes is the back-street Durham batter with a penchant for the occasional brawl and a cracking right cross is by the by. That the biggest controversy of the Ashes was the rosacea-faced confrontation between MCC members and Australian players over something called ‘the spirit of cricket’ but a footnote. 

First to be spotted is a piece in the Spectator which asks: “Why Can’t Football Pundits be More Like Cricket Commentators?”

“Cricket fans enjoy analysis from the erudite, intelligent and calmly explained voices of test match commentators. Football supporters must put up with the frenetic, confrontational and frankly banal screeching of the sport’s equivalent.” It laments. 

On it goes to point out that cricket manages insight and even-handedness where football is beset either by “aggressive tribalism” or “ the chummy chit chat of former players.”

Up to a point I’ll go with that, pausing only to point out that ‘aggressive tribalism’ is the stock in trade of Edgbaston’s Hollies Stand while cricket’s commentary boxes from TMS to Sky’s excellent TV coverage are a never ending series of chummy chats between former players. As Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussein, Ricky Ponting, Glenn McGrath, Jonathon Agnew, Mark Butcher, Kevin Pietersen and so on would all attest if you could get a word in to ask them.   

And while I will certainly go with the idea that silence is no longer golden in commentary and that endless stat barrages and personal back story insights rarely add much during a match, that blight is far from unique to football.

I admit to feeling somewhat conflicted in rushing to the defence of the round ball game. When I was a kid, I loved it. Someone once wrote that the diary of a Seventies boy would read something to the effect of “Kick football against garage door for three hours. Lunch. Kick football against garage door for three hours. Beans on toast. Bed.” That was me, that was. On into the deepening gloom of dusk, 35-29 and not yet half time. 

I have a vision of boyhood in which a Wembley Trophy football, an over-linseeded Gunn and Moore and a park should be mandatory. 

Thus it was that my father’s misplaced snobbery towards footie bred such an equal and opposite reaction that when I went to a ‘big school’ wholly devoted to the oval ball (in the face of its demographic), I resisted being dragooned into it till physically obliged to do so. 

Among games teachers who included a Welsh former paratrooper, a London Irish prop and a Commonwealth games discus medallist, the love of football was not felt and, as I fell into the arms of rugby I realised certain things were indubitably true. Namely that, for all its skills and thrills, the round ball was beset by amateur dramatics, an inability to shut up and a level of passion so intense that judgement is blinded for life. 

Later, I met professional players who conformed to all the stereotypes. Karl-Heinz Rumenigge of West Germany. Impressive. Gary Lineker, on whom far too many words have already been spent but should include ‘compare and contrast’. Oh, and two England greats in a BBC green room who sat in sullen expectation of an adoration they were doomed to wait a long time for. I was immediately reminded of a long lunch spent with an England prop who revealed that the football boys were alright until they suddenly developed a desire to overcompensate and talk about the size and expense of their watch.

But overcompensation works both ways and I maintain a deep suspicion of people who feel the need to make themselves feel good by making football feel bad. Its popularity, one can’t help but feel, irks those who feel hockey should get more TV time or that the nation would be a better place if more exposed to the values of sports like cricket or rugby, experience of which, by the way, leads me occasionally to conclude that their sense of superiority can be misplaced.  

Cricket commentary is, of course, a broadcast wonder. But it is a product of a game with time. The bowler walking back. The drinks break, the lunch break, the tea break, the rain break. It has time to consider. It is, also, unique in being, as Mike Atherton wisely put it: “A solo sport in a team sport framework.”  The endless pitting of individual champions in an unforgiving game where even the great  Don Bradman can be out for a duck or Ben Stokes slogged to the boundaries  to lose a World Cup final gives so much to discuss as well as the space to do it.

Football is compressed to ninety minutes of intensity. Its considerable emotions require release and its judgements must, therefore, be snap. Perhaps just enjoy each for what they are. Wasn’t that Ashes great?

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