Essential The Official Football (Soccer) Thread - We are SO back, the Premier League returns!

Roaden Polynice

Roaden Polynice

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Good to see the Surreal Football brehs still writing :bow:

http://vice.com/en_uk/read/was-football-really-better-in-the-90s-013

(Might be the mobile site)

England used to love a tragic, alcoholic anti-hero who literally pissed away his talent, from Best to Gascoigne. Now they call talkSPORT in a rage about Jack Wilshere smoking. Rooney has squandered much of his talent through not caring, but he’s gained no additional sympathy out of it, just hatred. Even the boozing itself, when it happens, has become boring – all crap Vegas holidays and 12-star Dubai hotels with the wife.
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Fans aren’t really all that racist any more, and that’s a good thing. Back in 1993 you could still get shyt for having an Irish accent in some stands in London, but then the Kick It Out Campaign was established as society accepted that being racist was now something you had to not be, or at least pretend not to be. These days there’s nothing that gets fans so irate as the suggestion that their club, themselves or their players could be racist. Especially when they are.

Liverpool and Chelsea are the prime Premier League candidates, as they booed Patrice Evra and Anton Ferdinand for being racially abused. What this shows is not necessarily that football is more or less racist, but how far fans debase themselves to defend their clubs. Liverpool and Arsenal are particularly sensitive to criticism, but the general trend is a move away from fans to fanboys. Clubs' fortunes are entangled with the average fan's sense of self-worth too intimately for them to accept criticism. My club is not racist – your players lied.
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And maybe that’s why something’s been lost on the pitch, too. The generally slower pace of the game produced by hangovers allowed people like Matt Le Tissier to exist, who would have to move to St Mirren to get a game now. It allowed random foreigners to come in and instantly look like world-class players, and indeed Cantona, Juninho and Zola were soon beating English defenders in a very similar style to a sober man fighting a drunk one, or at least running around him in circles really quickly. Nearly every team used to have a player like this, but now the closest thing we have is probably Hatem Ben Arfa, growing fat in Newcastle’s stiffs.

In some ways this is a good thing, but something’s been lost too since the early-to-mid 90s, the last ride of the alkies. Manchester United may have lost out on a few titles because Bryan Robson’s teammates weren’t as capable of drinking 20 pints the night before a game as he was, but it produced a team of likeable heroes. It made for a deeper connection, and they fought in derbies still hungover the next day. They were, simply, supermen.
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