Suzanne Harrington: 'It’s not the football I hate, it’s the punditry'

"With the possible exception of Roy Keane, who consistently presents as a furiously disappointed PE teacher, football punditry has elevated blokespeak"

THE real reason so many people — particularly female people — have no interest in football is not because it involves 22 athletic men zipping around a pitch performing balletic acts interspersed with Oscar-worthy dramatic interludes of falling, rolling, gurning, clenching, gasping, and emoting. It’s not that. That’s dead entertaining, and frequently exciting.

Also, unlike their lumpen rugby counterparts, football players are always installing new hairdos, which makes them a lot like boy bands, except faster and fitter. Dreads, quiffs, mohawks, skinfades, hair carving, and ill-advised colour experiments, thy name is football. Phil Foden has a new bleach job and so the tabloids have compared him to Gazza, which is clearly wrong, given how he’s channelling Depeche Mode, circa 1985.