The things I hate about the beautiful game

AND so the long league season in Blighty is almost all over bar the shouting, screaming and wailing as the final day relegation/promotion battles take centre stage.

Any minute now your television screen will fill up – as, no doubt, will you – with the poignant image of a red-faced young ‘un, bottom lip quivering as he weeps copious salt tears into his pristine club shirt.

But, hey, that’s enough about Ronaldo, whose brand of pouty petulance rather detracted from his ability to score miraculous goals, and is one of those things we’d rather hope not to have to endure again in 2009/10.

But by no means the only one. The latest issue of ‘FourFourTwo’ magazine presents “49 Things We Hate About Football” although they hasten to add, “even though it’s still the best thing on the planet”. Which is probably wise. After all, it might not be the smartest sales strategy if, for example, ‘Gardening Today’ offered “50 Good Reasons To Tarmac Your Lawn” or ‘Gourmet Cook’ ran a piece entitled ‘Celebrity Chefs – Why They Should All Die Roaring’. Which is not to say that they would, in any way, be unjustified, just a tad ill-advised in the current difficult publishing climate.

Similarly, even as a footie nut – in fact, especially as a footie nut – I wouldn’t have any quarrel with many of the exhibits in ‘FourFourTwo’s’ Hall of Infamy. Naff music booming over the PA when a goal is scored? Check. Grand Slam Sunday, massive, massive games, and all that Sky high hype? Check. Phil Brown’s headset? Check. Tony Pulis’ hat? Check.

However, much as I would like to fill this column by shamelessly ripping off the rest of the list, I feel honour-bound (the sports editor is looking over my shoulder) to offer my own humble suggestions for things in football which really get my goat.

Still holding at Number One – and has been for quite a few years – is the refusal to countenance using video technology as a refereeing aid. This numbskull resistance to change is probably most pithily and pathetically expressed in the popular phrase “human error is an integral part of the game”. Strangely, this philosophical attitude is rarely in evidence when a player misses an open goal or a ‘keeper lets a soft one slip through his fingers. But, despite the technology being readily available to promptly right wrongs, it’s seen as some sacred part of the sport’s tradition that officialdom continue to be allowed to get things spectacularly wrong, often with rather significant consequences for the hapless victims (hello Chelsea).

I suppose it would also be too much to hope that we might see the extermination of a few of the more deadening football cliches. And I don’t mean old reliables like “a game of two halves” and “at the end of the day, it’s 11 against 11, Brian”. Like the poor and Gary Lineker, they will always be with us. No, it’s the jumped up, Johnny Come Latelies which do my head in. “The wall does its job.” (How come the recession hasn’t done away with that one?) “He had only one thing on his mind?” (Let me guess – the Lisbon referendum?) “Good feet” (Useful for playing football, right enough). And then there’s the chief bull-goose loony cliché of the modern game: “He put in a great shift.” In other words, he may earn £100,000 (€113,000) a week, live in a stately pile and drive something as big as a tank, but his 75 minutes of box-to-box action is meant to make us think of him as an authentic working class hero akin to a black-faced miner resurfacing after 12 hours down a pit.

While we’re on the subject, any chance we could bring a halt to runaway inflation in football? And I don’t mean spiralling wages (like the wealthy, they will always etc). Nope, I’m referring to the mathematical impossibility whereby giving 100% is no longer enough. In fact, nowadays, even the gold standard 110% won’t do, not when you have that well-known economist Harry Redknapp routinely praising his players for giving – and I quote – “a fousand per cent”. (See also Robbie Keane, a “top, top, top, top” player, according to ‘Arry).

Would that Newcastle United would have such problems. Almost every season without fail, and some times twice a season, the cameras are outside St James’ Park to witness scenes of joyous celebration as poor deluded Geordies rapturously welcome the second-coming of Keegan/Owen/Shearer/Wor Jackie Milburn/Wor Jesus Christ Himself (delete where applicable). And always, always, the whole thing ends in tears. In this respect, the Toon Army are a bit like those cults who are forever predicting the end of the world, and then congregating atop a hill on the appointed date at the appointed hour only to wind up, like Peter Cook in the celebrated sketch, having to concede when the moment has passed without incident that “well, no, it wasn’t quite the conflagration we had expected”. In the interests of human decency, we really must put a stop to this.

MIND you, there’s still one good reason to hope that Shearer does mastermind the great escape tomorrow and is persuaded to stay in the job – it’ll mean marginally less stating of the bleeding obvious on MOTD next season.

And so to the football irritant which, more than any other, scrapes its fingernails down the blackboard of my brain: managerial mind games. Now, I fully accept that I would virtually be out of a job if Rafa never had a ‘pop’ at Fergie, and Fergie didn’t have a ‘pop’ back at Rafa, and Arsene wished that someone other than his own club’s supporters would think it was worth having a ‘pop’ at him any more. Yes, the back pages love the mind games but does anyone believe for one moment that they have a meaningful impact on the pitch? Do you seriously think that Steven Gerrard reads the paper last thing in the dressing room and thinks to himself, “Good counter-thrust by the gaffer there in his ongoing war of words with his old adversary – I must make sure that I reward him by giving a 1,000% on the field of battle today?”

You do? Great, you’re on Sky Sports. But try not to swear – Gary Newbon really, really, really hates that.