Football is for morons pt.2

Hello.

I'm no good at football, I never have been, even as a child I would be the last to be picked or end up in goal, smoking Gitanes. My local team are QPR who've been shit for at least the last 25 years. Although I did try going for a season, and enjoyed shouting about how wonderful west London is (it's full of tits, fanny and Rangers you know), paying £25 to bellow abuse at Peter Crouch, arguably the best player they've ever had, ultimately didn't strike me as worthwhile.

Obviously disliking football is up there for me with disliking people who watch TV, people who read the Metro, people who read Dan Brown novels, people who believe that you can cultivate self-respect in the unemployed by giving them money, people who live in Hackney and refuse to see that it's a shithole, no better than, for instance, Shepherds Bush, only with more bastards and now also my ex-girlfriend, people who like Henry James, people who try to make you read Henry James, proles, poshos and the bourgoisie, pro-Palestinian bores, pro-Israeli bores and Australians.

Yes, it's part of a carefully cultivated pomposity designed to alienate most of the population.

But really, while I don't have any special aversion to footballs, or the game of football (it is, after all, a game, and there plenty of things in the world worth hating without including arbitrary rule systems) I find The Game of Football appalling.

Football stadia are cathedrals to conformity, places where men take their sons to learn how to be men, to relish violence and shouting, to engage in arcane and pointless discussion meant solely to alienate the uninitiated and women. The whole thing runs on fear - knowing the songs, when to whistle, the off-side rule, when there's going to be trouble - on the fear of looking like a mug, of not knowing how to be a proper man. Blokes have to talk about football in pubs, because otherwise, they might have to talk about how they're feeling, their hopes and fears, what they want from life and in fact, what the whole business of living could possibly be for and come on you muppet you're having a fucking laugh aren't you?

You only need to try to suggest the idea of mixed football teams to fan of the beautiful game to see what a very unbeautiful game it is.

And if you turn barely literate 21 year olds into deities, what do they do? I don't find it shocking, just depressingly unimaginative. They could do anything, literally, but ah if only they had brains, for all the poor dears can think of is plugging themselves into either end of a bright orange secretarial college drop out.

And that would be fine, if the whole edifice of football weren't run by elderly men with toupees, endorsers of incontinence pads and crisps, geezers who made good, who still believe that it's family entertainment and that every incident of violence, rape and racism is merely an isolated incident that shouldn't be allowed to bring the whole game into disrepute Des.

Interestingly, a lot of football fans are socialists, exactly the kind of socialists who want to prevent parents from sending their children to privately owned schools, for the benefit of the population generally. What I always thing would be fun would be to ban football, and to relocate local schools into football grounds. Lessons would be taught as usual, only in the presence of several thousand screaming fans. No one would forget their Geography homework if they had the local Firm to answer to at break-time. You pay £400 a season you want to get your money's worth from year seven don't you?

Anyway, I thought I'd get that out of the way. Thank god for Red Dead Redemption - I be will spending the next few months playing virtual horse shoe throwing with my virtual friend Gus McCloud.

I dunno who made that ad up there, but they must be some kind of creative genius.