Grey Areas in Fitba
And so the finale to another Premier League campaign is upon us, the race just 90 minutes from being run. As we know from fable and cliché, the end of the season is the time by which the settling dusts of the season’s controversies will have evened themselves out on the scales of Justice.
For QPR and Bolton, for Spurs, Arsenal and Newcastle, there are still teeth to be gnashed, hair to be pulled, heart rates to spiral and stress balls to be chucked across living rooms, knocking ornaments from the mantelpiece (no parachute payments). And you can bet that before the season’s final curtain falls there will be one last explosion of outrage and indignation, one last ruckus, regardless of what’s gone before – for each year the list of iffy decisions and litany of managerial grievances appears to get longer and longer. And if that ire is an illusion created by Sky’s prompt and pushy microphone thrusters, then it is undeniable that each year the hot and acrid splutterings on the web ratchet up ever closer to a lunacy commensurate with the overall helium-balloon sanity of the game.
That Wigan have avoided their traditional final day escapology and thus some of this snorting, vein popping, wall-punching rage is something of a surprise, not least because they were so cruelly denied a point or three at Stamford Bridge last month by not one but two offside goals. But survive they have – thanks to a series of incredible results rather than luck evening itself out.
Nevertheless – and despite what the reckoners reckon – there are certainly teams across all divisions nursing legitimate complaints that cannot simply be appeased with platitudes about the sum of decisions affecting them attaining some sort of Taoist balance. They’ve got the rough end of the stick, and there’s no smooth end to take the rough with. It might be just as much of a dog-eared and trite-sounding cliché to say this – which is not to say it’s any less apposite for that – but these decisions change the course of seasons, of careers, of entire lives. They matter. Perhaps, then, it is time for football to think about, y’know, maybe helping its officials with disambiguated rules and modern technology, and not just for the line decision that hurt Tottenham so badly at Wembley. The stakes are ever higher. Magnanimity is in short supply. Someone is going to flip.
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Modern football: a great hiss and rumble and throb of barely stifled fury, of bottlenecked fervour, of displaced political anger trained on the poor old bastard in the black. With so much money (and personal self-worth) invested in an archaically administered and intrinsically chaotic enterprise, one in which the bounce of the ball and the interpretations of one inherently limited man and his two (or four) confreres determine the outcome – hardly the place for shoving half-a-billion quid, you’d imagine – it becomes more and more plausible (certainly if Twitter is an accurate barometer of the zeitgeist) that these overworked officials will one day soon be targeted by an overheated, deranged supporter. After all, football has already sparked at least one war elsewhere in the world.
This is not scaremongering. It is the simple recognition of a possible outcome borne of the confluence of financial and passional forces coursing through each and every match and slowly warming up football’s bubbling pot. Possible, not inevitable.
It is this conflict, this contradiction between the ever higher stakes and emotional investment on the one hand, and, on the other, the ambiguity and uncertainty that pervade the game, that effectively fans the flames of footballing frustration and foments the fans’ fury. I mean, the heavy-hitters in other multibillion pound industries at least have the good sense to get governments onside (or offside, but passive) and in their pockets, thus ensuring that their investments are protected from the vicissitudes of the markets. And yet football – notwithstanding the Trades Descriptions Act-challenging expansion of the “Champions” League in 1992 – has the destiny of its protagonists at the mercy of referees’ eminently human limitations, our inescapably restricted capacity to perceive and process a flux of sensory data, regardless of best intentions and general competence.
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