Football family? Bollocks
Do you know where football falls short? I bet you fucking think you do. There are loads of places, but the way articles work usually – in a world where talent is edited out and the only idiosyncrasy allowed is that which falls tightly within the place marked out for it – is you write about one thing at a time. Bowing to convention, then, like a mug, today’s story is about football being ruthless.
Newspaper columnists and fat men who wear suits on television find it comforting to talk about a football family. There probably is one. Dean Windass revealed this week that he has been “humbled” by the support he has received after talking openly about his depression for the first time. Former players and his hometown club, Hull City, have helped him about. But the grim caveat about families is that some people aren’t and never will be a part of them.
The football family is choosy about who it lets in. No-one, for instance, will think long about Steve Kean when he is sacked as manager of Blackburn Rovers. The analysis will likely come down to a set of smug grins and some affirmative nodding from men like Alan Hansen who will describe the move as inevitable and good. Neither will the blinkers be taken off if David De Gea doesn’t make it at Manchester United and falls into a career as a drifter from a Hemingway short-story.
The reason we can be sure of the fate of both is because we have seen it before. Football cares deeply for men who have made it: as local club heroes, as world stars, or as anything else. It refuses to recognise people who haven’t: Ronnie Wallwork who fell into crime after failing to make it at United and then anywhere else he was sent off to, or Christopher Wreh, who ended up playing for Buckingham Town after scoring three winning goals for Arsenal in 1998.
Obviously, it’s only reflecting the world around it. The world around it: where you go to bed because you’re feeling miserable and come back downstairs later to find that your friends have eaten your chips and think it’s quite funny, rather than considering that you’ve not got anything else to eat. Or where you end up sitting alone on the front row of a lecture because you don’t speak smalltalk. The rest of the world doesn’t care about the people who don’t enter into its centre-stage either.
People don’t care about the peripheral figures. Football certainly doesn’t. Now, if it could just admit that I’d go to bed happy. Well, not happy, but less miserable. I feel appalling. Happy Sunday.
Photo courtesy of WellOffside.com
