Skip to main content

Football is boring

I need to gromble about football. It's boring! Having just slept through my second 90 minute England game, I've discovered a way to make the experience marginally more bearable. Live pause the programme, and play at double speed after about an hour of pause. Many advantages:
  • You get no sound. No bloody vuvuwhatevers (sounds like your living rooms been attacked by bees). No pratt telling you 'if only they'd score more goals, they'd be winning'. No loud-mouthed lout on the pitch giving the ref a hard time. No gum-chewing expletives from an overpaid foreign manager on the sidelines.
  • No ads... fast forward even faster through them. Even the one that flashed on our screen during England's only goal against the USA. Brilliant timing! 
  • No wankers at half time lolling about on sofas telling us who's having a good or bad game (we can bloody see for ourselves).
  • And most importantly, the players look a lot more skillful while the ball itself travels FASTER. At normal speed, the ball takes forever to get to the next player, who then either passes backwards (really boring), forwards, sideways or gets tackled. If you add up all the seconds of proper excitement in a normal game (England at a world cup game produce none), you probably get about a minute - max. That means 89 minutes of excruciatingly boring passing stuff - now compressed to a slightly less painful 45 minutes.
So why is footie so damn boring. Well firstly it was invented with too few rules. There's nothing to think about:
  • Use your foot to kick the ball, not someone else
  • Kick it into a goal more often than the others
  • Don't get (and this does, I admit, verge on complexity) offside
Now I'm a rugby fanatic (rich source of future grombles by the way). Rugby is for intellectuals. It has an infinite number of rules. No-one understands them all and new ones are invented at random all the time. People with huge brains, called referees, decide whether any have been broken - and people get to hit each other really hard - legally! Plus you get scores like 65-24 and usually decent beer to drink at the grounds. Good sausages and chips too. I've just watched 90 minutes of England drawing 0-0 with Algeria (Algeria! Famous for terrorists and dates). Had this been a club game, chances are I would be writing this from a hospital bed nursing multiple stab wounds having fallen asleep on an opposition supporter's shoulder, and a wallet lighter by hundreds of pounds (well a lot more than a premiership rugby game costs to watch live).

Now I'm not arguing that footie doesn't require great athleticism, or that a few goals are truly amazing feats of genius. But oh how rarely we see them. And once you've seen one 6-packed player (bastard show-off) expertly trap and kick a ball past an opponent, why hang around to watch another do the same thing? Pass forward, pass back, pass sideways, pass, pass, pass, shoot, miss. Pass forwards,....

Sorry - Football is boring, except for the bits that aren't, and there aren't enough of them to keep me awake. Pause and fast forward... it's the only way.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking an interest.

Popular posts from this blog

Phillips screws - yes I'm angry about them too

Don't get me wrong. They're a brilliant invention to assist automation and prevent screwdrivers from slipping off screw heads - damaging furniture, paintwork and fingers in the process. Interestingly they weren't invented by Mr Phillips at all, but by a John P Thompson who sold Mr P the idea after failing to commercialise it. Mr P, on the otherhand, quickly succeeded where Mr T had failed. Incredible isn't it. You don't just need a good idea, you need a great salesman and, more importantly, perfect timing to make a success out of something new. Actually, it would seem, he did two clever things (apart from buying the rights). He gave the invention to GM to trial. No-brainer #1. After it was adopted by the great GM, instead of trying to become their sole supplier of Phillips screws, he sold licenses to every other screw manufacturer in the world. A little of a lot is worth a great deal more than a lot of a little + vulnerability (watch out Apple!). My gromble is abo
7 comments
Read more

Would we pay more for their stuff?

I'm confused. Brexiters argue the Germans, Italians and French will still want to sell us their cars, so continued free trade with the UK is in their best interests. But we'll have to negotiate this (with an EU unwilling to make leaving easy) by threatening to make their cars more expensive for British people to buy. We'll do this because WE need to make imports more expensive to try to restore our balance of payments. Are Brits prepared to pay more for their Audis, Fiats and Renaults in order to make British cars more appealing, or do Brexiters want to pay more in order to punish them for taxing our insurance and banking products? Either way, imports will cost more. While in the EU, we buy their cars because we like the choice and don't want our own government to tax them. Indeed it would be better for British car manufacturing if we went back to the good old days of being encouraged to buy cheaper British cars (made by foreign owned factories). Is that what Brexite
Post a Comment
Read more

Addictions. Porn, Drugs, Alcohol and Sex. Don't prevent it, make it safer.

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat
Post a Comment
Read more