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God I hate football. Thank God this crap is over

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I do not apologise for this negative post.

For the past month, during this actual pandemic, maskless people in large crowds in bars have been spraying saliva at each other as various teams of millionaires kick a ball pointlessly. As a result, the UK now has more positive coronavirus cases than all of the EU combined. 2000 coronavirus cases in Scotland have been traced to the Scotland England game.

Tonight thugs in Leicester Square have been chucking bottles. The tweet I have linked to, and again I do not apologise for posting it, features a football fan punching a child and an Asian man getting kicked in the head. All In the pace of a minute. And in Wembley. The “home” to which football has been “coming.”

Seriously you lot. WHAT THE FUCK?

I admit, I loath football, but not as much as I loath football fans. Hell, as you can see, they assault children, people from ethnic minority communities then probably go home an assault their families. Domestic abuse in England goes up by, I think, 38% when England lose.

So I have a serious question. Why should we put up with this? If I get long covid because I was sat next to some twattish maskless football fan in the tube, who should I blame? Spare me this crap about “real fans” just not being like that. This shit has been happening for my entire life. I can’t even blame Brexit, or the current tory government. Football fans are awful. Even if the current England team appear not to be their fans are appalling.

Yes I am annoyed. The nation’s health has been put at risk so that absolute arseholes get to watch a fucking terrible game take place over a month. At least people tend not to kick each other’s heads in a music music festivals, and they only last a weekend. Why are football fans so fucking entitled?

https://twitter.com/KyleJGlen/status/1414294866704617486

7

Comments

  1. Again, and I can’t emphasise this enough.

    We are still in a pandemic. I am 47, and just got my second jab last week. People in their thirties or under are very likely to be working in these pubs. They have not been jabbed. At 11am this morning, as I went to buy milk, the queue of maskless people outside my local pub was huge. Did these people spend the next 11 hours there? Shouting at probably unvaccinated bar staff in their 20s?

    The sheer selfishness bewilders me.

  2. You’re absolutely right, Gangle. I couldn’t believe the scenes in Leicester Square HOURS before a ball was even kicked. Coming on top of the endless, nauseating smugness of every fucker mindlessly repeating you-know-what, I was at best ambivalent about them winning, and veering towards hoping Italy would win so those bastards wouldn’t have anything to celebrate. They’re a national disease, quite literally.

  3. Not condoning that violence at all. But after watching it I got the context – those coming in through the white door and getting evicted out of it, did not have tickets and were trying to gatecrash.

    • So was my guy defending the safety of ticketed fans by punching a child? I must confess the context eluded me. Did the Asian guy being kicked in the head not have a ticket? Sadly i could not see beyond the simple violence.

      • I said I wasn’t condoning it. But yes it looks like the Asian guy didn’t have a ticket but no surprises that he got more “attention” than others. The guys inside thought they were helping stewards but were merely enjoying the trouble.

  4. If you want to watch violence check out Danny Baker’s Twitter page and the kicking he is getting for his “you are uselessEngland” drunken tweets.
    FFS I went to bed with him wearing 3 English shirts on Twitter and wake up to “a team that has never been convincing fucked up”. What a twat.

    • Danny drinks too much when he tweets these days. He is always trying to sound controversial and doesn’t seem to have forgiven England football for dropping Gazza in 1998.

      • Dropping Gazza in 1998 – after cheerily encouraging Gazza to get out of his tree and act up with him and Chris Evans. In his autobiography Baker comes across as pretty callous about his mate Gascoigne’s alcoholism, even goading him to drink when he knew he was battling to stay sober.

        • Danny Baker is an absolute twat whose lofty opinion of himself is sort of hilarious given his actual achievements. Always has been. Always will be.

          I’ve never understood the fawning he gets from certain quarters, so it’s been gratifying to see him show his arse so unarguably over the last couple of years. Twitter does have some uses.

  5. It baffles me that the one sport the nation doesn’t tend to win – men’s football – seems to cause this, when in women’s football, or rugby, tennis, cricket etc, we seem to do much better.

    When you also compare to the civilised audiences at some of the above, it’s a total disgrace.

    I think the current England team seem to be some genuinely good role-models, which is a nice change, but sadly it doesn’t translate to a fairly sizeable number of fans.

  7. My daughter and I watched a film last night with a take away. When I went to get the food, there was a stereotypical “fan” sitting in the shop, waiting for an order: Late 40s, shaved head, Engerlaaand shirt and no fucking mask, despite there being signs everywhere. I waited outside but even then there were a couple of twats with beer cans in the obligatory shirts, wobbling towards the Co-op, being loud for no good reason. It’s been impossible to avoid and I hate the way it brings out the thug in a significant minority. That and all the shouting. Especially the shouting.

  9. Domestic violence increases after England lose. I seem to remember reading somewhere it was by 38%. It also increases after England win (by 28%).

    The problem with a significant proportion of ‘lads’ who support England is that they regard it as necessary to get completely smashed in order to watch the game. Starting before lunch for an evening kick off. By the time the match starts, the drunken abuse and violence has already begun.

  10. I don’t loathe football… the version of it I see (three times in the last six days, with another game tomorrow) is played in front of about 200 people of all ages. I watch the Women’s team on Sundays.

    The version I used to see in London would regularly have 22 players line up in front of the (again) 200 supporters from every ethnic background you could possibly imagine.

    The first black kids I ever spoke to was when sitting on the wall at Orient, usually with one lad either side of me, watching our favourite player, Laurie Cunningham.

    I did used to see men like this (don’t see so many in Cornwall). They be in the pubs or betting shops in the High Street when I’d be off to see Boreham Wood, Dagenham, Ilford, Barkingside, Wingate & Finchley, Hornchurch et al.
    They’d be watching the Chelsea v. Man. Utd. on TV when their grandfathers/great grandfathers would have either been playing or going to the ground.
    Check out Dennis Potter’s brilliant documentary for a stupendously accurate foresight to where the sport was heading… made in 62!!!!

    I never saw any such person at any of the places I frequented.

    Part of my loathing of the dire 1980s (I do loathe that) was football violence and the general lazy, predictable behaviour mentioned in this post which seemed to start some time after the 60s.
    I’ve given up on this country, not the football team.
    I’ve given up on tabloid culture, not the football team.

    Now is very much a Michael Jackson is dead – avoid all media moment. As for this inspirational, (and compared to the government far more) sensitive and (far, far, far more) intelligent band of very likable individuals – next game is on 2nd September, and I shall focus my all on it at 7.30 p.m. (the kick off is at 7.45) on that day, and no sooner.

    I avoid all this shite like the plague (quite apt!). It’s actually the polar opposite of Raheem Sterling’s smiling face on a football field.

    And… I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like football. I never have, and I never will. The dull ones at school were the ones who didn’t, and they always seemed to be Elvis Costello fans.

        • I like Elvis Costello and football too and I think the original post on here is completely over the top and not entirely accurate.
          Firstly regarding the face masks I was at Hampton Court Flower show yesterday before the game and there were thousands there without face masks. There was no domestic violence and no drunken behaviour.
          If a govt has announced that face masks will no longer be mandatory after the 19th July I would love you to rationally explain to me what the difference is between now and then. I would tend to blame the government for this rather than football fans.
          I am sure in the houses where domestic violence increases after a football match that domestic violence is already there. It is a national problem not a football problem.
          I know a couple of people who were at the game yesterday who both said the atmosphere was friendly and great fun with no sign of hatred. Obviously the media look for something bad to report on. The fact that these incidents occurred is abhorrent but not sure everyone who behaved impeccably should be tarnished with the same brush.
          4 or 5 of the younger lads in our office all watched with their mates in crowded pubs. All report it being good natured and no hint of violence. So yes there was some bad but an awful lot of good and the pride in our football team and in our nation shouldn’t be denigrated because of a few nutters and racist idiots.
          We are not all like that. Far from it.

          • Nobody’s saying football fans are All Like It, but nobody can deny that the small minority that Are Like It are a big problem to the rest of us.
            And Shock! Horror! not all of them are Violent Drunks, some of them are just Violent.

            • I agree with the second part of your response. However for the first part plenty of people are suggesting football fans are all like it and I think the original post was intimating that.
              I have been watching football since I was 9 years old and the days of the late 60′, 70′ and 80’s were much worse than the current environment around football. Severe violence, really vile racism and just a horrible macho atmosphere. These days there are a large number of women at football matches, clubs have adopted a family environment and the malaise has mostly been lifted. England International matches may be more of a problem but even they have improved massively when you think back to the random violence we would see when England were ‘on tour’.

    • @deramdaze

      “Check out Dennis Potter’s brilliant documentary for a stupendously accurate foresight to where the sport was heading… made in 62!!!!”

      Have checked YT and Google but no avail. Any link to – or more info on – this, DD?

  11. I watched the final and was appalled by the tedious, incessant booing every time Italy had the ball.

    Is that a new thing (I haven’t watched any of the other matches)?

    It was just so….mindless. Pointless.

    Southgate seems like such a solid bloke, it would be refreshing if he called out the fans.

    “You want to boo the opposition? Stay away, you don’t represent this team or what we stand for. You want to boo your OWN team for taking the knee? Jog on, and take your support elsewhere. You want to shower racist abuse on some England players after the penalty shootout? You’re a disgrace and should never bother to claim to be an England supporter ever again.”

    • It’s been standard fan behaviour abroad since time immemorial, but this is the first tournament where I’ve heard England fans consistently boo the opposition while they simply have possession of the ball. It feels like a new thing here. I associate it as something South American and southern European fans have always done.

  12. @ganglesprocket

    I share your dismay and share your aversion to the morons who can only express themselves with their fists. But look through the ‘Football’ thread from @bingo-little, see the joy and the passion there from players and followers alike?

    That’s what it’s all about. Not the thickos, not the racists, not the lowest common denominator thuggery, not the rampant selfish ignorance. That’s all present throughout societies everywhere you look, because homo sapiens isn’t very sapient in a lot of cases. You can’t change that by not playing football.

    • I don’t expect them to change. You can’t polish turds into gold.

      What I expect is for this not to be indulged. Four weeks of this I have had to put up with. It’s been in the papers, it’s been online, it’s been on the telly, it’s been on the radio.

      It’s being cheered on and indulged. And I repeat, during a pandemic.

      What would maybe change my mind would be if, today, Gareth Southgate gave a press conference and called out the thugs, the morons and the racists who have been spreading covid to poor underpaid bar staff, and tweeting foul shit to his players.

      What would definitely change my mind would be if the English fans policed themselves like the Scotland fans did. Remember in the seventies? Scotland fans were the worst thugs in Europe, that stopped when some serious self policing became the norm.

      Frankly, until England does the same, I have nothing but contempt.

      By the way, I am not a middle class guy sneering at the proles, I am the product of a comprehensive school, an averagely shit town and a council estate.

      • Scottish football fans used to be genuinely terrifying. I remember at one Old Firm game the guy asked me for a look at the paper. “Found out this chappie has been messin roond with ma wife. Took a hammer to his heid last night. Just checking I’ve no killed ‘im”.
        Then suddenly and collectively Scotland fans decided they were better than their English counterparts and started on the road to being everybody’s favourite supporters.
        Maybe, one day, who knows yer typical English fan will think “Let’s go out and have a good time and be nice”.
        In that alternate universe Scotland go on to beat Brazil 8-7 in the World Cup Final

  13. Football fans reflect society. The proportion of arseholes may vary to a degree depending on the event but the last time I went to football, there were less arseholes than at the last gig. (Reading v Leeds and Teenage Fanclub since your ask).

    • I’ve done a rough calculation of the total audience at all the gigs & festivals I’ve been to in a lifetime and came up with a conservative estimate of 5 million. I don’t ever recall a scene like the one Gangle posted above.

      60,000 English football ‘fans’ at Wembley and I somehow expect it.

      • Well …… I’ve been to a lot of gigs and almost as much football. I’ve seen two punches thrown at football matches in over 40 years of watching, and one of those missed. At gigs I’ve seen something close to a dozen fights, and threatened twice and attacked once.

        It’s not the sport, it’s not the music. It’s the booze. There were 60,000 at Wembley and the vast majority behaved, They weren’t “fans”. They were just fans.

        • If I went to, say, Glastonbury, and U2 were headlining, there would be no need for a security cordon to keep me, and other Bono haters, away from U2 fans. And plenty of people there are in pretty advanced stages of intoxication from all sorts of stuff.

          It’s not the booze. It’s the thugs. Booze brings out what’s already inside.

          • Everyone is stoned at Glastonbury, and has spent hundreds of pounds to be there. Replace the weed with “Saturday night in Luton” amounts of lager, make the event free (as most drunken football watching last night was, not including the stadium itself), multiply the numbers by 10,000 and distribute the event across every town in the country, and then see what happens.

            Music fans aren’t better. Snobbier, often. More misanthropic. Possibly physically less prepossessing than the average. But not better.

          • Comparing the two countries I’m most familiar with, one of the worst aspects of England, that doesn’t exist to anywhere near the same extent in Italy, is the recreational violence. As far as football fans are concerned, Italian football -despite many exceptions- doesn’t have the same stigma of thuggery that English football has. The very different approaches to alcohol certainly play a role in this, but I’d suggest it’s all linked to wider cultural values. Italy, especially the south, is a culture dominated by the family and the church in a way that is no longer true of England. This influence brings with it both positives and negatives. Among the positives, I’d cite both the lack of recreational violence and the healthy attitude towards alcohol.

            • I’d say you’ve never had Napoli’s travelling support descend on your local area.

              Plenty of thuggery in Italian fandom, both historic and contemporary, it just tends to express itself at club level.

            • I have been in Milan when a Milan derby took place. The violence was actually quite staggering although it was a good few years ago.
              Would also say there is a bigger problem with racism at Italian football matches.

              • Struggling to think of a time any British football fans might’ve held up a banner saying “Auschwitz la vostra patria, i forni le vostre case”, as Lazio fans did at Roma.

                I mean, it would be weird if English football fans suddenly started communicating in Italian, granted, but you get the picture.

                • An 18 month old quote from Italy’s goalscorer last night, after a black team mate refused to celebrate a goal after being racially abused by half the stadium:

                  “You celebrate goals with your teammates. He could have done it differently… I think the blame is 50-50. Moise should not have done that and the Curva should not have reacted in that way.”

                  Could cite a million other examples.

                  The Italian national team were a fabulous watch this tournament. The Italian football culture, on the other hand, leaves at least as much to be desired as the English, in many ways.

    • Reading v Leeds and Teenage Fanclub?

      Sorry mate, but that’s a proper muggy fixture. If you want a real tear up you need to come down Millwall v Sheff Utd and Belle & Sebastian, see how it’s done.

  14. The only thing I hate about football is its tendency to inspire misanthropy and snobbery in people who think they’re too good for it.

    I don’t watch football, but I don’t mind it being on. The coverage hasn’t affected my life a jot: everything but the final blew past me. I was completely unaffected. Most people seem to have had a lovely time at the games and watching the games. And, as we’ve seen from the protests and other outdoor events over the course of the pandemic, there’s never an associated spike in infections, so that feels a bit like reaching for a reason to hate it.

    I don’t like our drinking culture much (understatement), but I don’t think that’s football’s fault. It’s independent of it: British people often get blind drunk, and if almost every single one is also watching something passion-inspiring in public, a number will shit the bed. But the scenes from last night which are most offensive (and there were a few, though the flare thing is just kind of funny and hurting nobody except one man’s ringpiece) are really just Saturday night in any British town centre writ large and televised. That’s not good, but it’s not football’s fault.

    I genuinely believe there’s more to dislike in almost any other community of fans, including music fans, than there is in football fandom. It’s just that most fandoms are very small. As @leedsboy suggests above, I suspect that if you scaled up the average gig audience to football size it would be much worse, and the people would be much bigger twats.

    OOAA.

  15. Does football actually turn somebody into a thug? That does seem a bit unlikely. I think they’re thugs that watch football rather than the other way round.
    That said, a thug is a thug with no defence.

  16. As a Scot who spent much of my teens in Wales and my whole adult life, since 1985, in various parts of England it always used to bother me that I couldn’t find any good will for the England football team. Then came Southgate, with a team of appealing young players whom the nation celebrated when they did well, and if they lost against better opposition would just shrug and accept it.

    One glorious sunny day in 2018 I was in central London when England beat Sweden in the World Cup. We were in town for a matinee of Bat Out of Hell the Musical, but before the match we wandered through Soho where Pride was in full flow with all the rainbows and good cheer that a liberal, well-meaning straight couple could wish for.

    My (English) other half had hoped to avoid the score until we got home, but that was blown by one of the cast emerging for his curtain call with an England flag drawn on his chest in greasepaint to enormous cheers, then Charing Cross Road was packed solid with beery football fans running into the theatre crowd and Pride merging from either side, a mass of St George’s and rainbow flags and a communal observation that football was coming home.

    It was all enormously joyous, and I realised that all it took for me to like the England team, if not exactly wish the greatest success on them, was for the England football team to be likable. It was a million miles away from the belligerent entitlement, the pre-emptive bad temperedness always hovering on, or past, the brink of violence which I had come to assume was a natural and indivisible part of the national team’s fans’ identity.

    It was clear that Southgate and his team were way ahead of some of their fans on social issues, from taking the knee, to support for LGBTQ supporters, to messages in sympathy with Emma Raducanu, to Rashford’s involvement in school meals. This was a team largely from un-privileged backgrounds who wanted to use their position for good and progress, as well as being more successful than their direct predecessors on the pitch.

    All this came at some reputational cost among those whose esteem is not worth having. Some fans booed them taking the knee, using the excuse of an unconvincingly sophisticated familiarity with Marxism. The same politicians who castigated Southgate and his team for ‘gesture politics’ and urged them to keep politics out of sport found themselves unable to keep sport out of politics. Jacob Rees-Mogg recited John Barnes’ World in Motion rap in the House, and the Prime Minister decorated number 10 in England flags and squeezed an XXL England shirt over his collar and tie to attend the Germany game, Farage tried to hijack the final as a vindication for his own brand of patriotism.

    And then it all started to look familiar. We were in central London again when the Germany game was played. It was my girlfriend’s birthday and we went for a meal and to the opera. Screens had been set up in Trafalgar Square and some lads who didn’t have tickets had climbed the steps of St Martin in the Fields to see over the hoardings. ‘Two world wars and one World Cup, doo-dah, doo-dah’ they sang. They did look older than 25. Then came Leicester Square, which the BBC News directly before the game didn’t even mention, that bloke with a flare up his arse and the other one with the tiny cock, the ticketless rushing the barriers at Wembley.

    So in the end they lost against the better team, though people seems to forget that they held that other team for well over two hours of play before falling with weak penalties. So it goes, but I hope the progress which Southgate’s tam made on and off the pitch isn’t squandered. I rather enjoy being able to like the national team where I live.

  17. Isn’t most of it just drunkenness? Collective, competitive drunkenness at that. Football, for a lot of people, seems to be just something that goes on in the background while you get wankered. I don’t know how or why this has happened with football in particular.

    • Yep. Britain has a drinking problem. A really nasty one. But it’s not football’s fault – it’s just that football attracts the biggest crowds and some people can’t handle their booze at all. Like I say above, though, it’s just Saturday night in every British town centre, scaled up.

      Horrendous drunken behaviour takes many forms, and I bet there are any number of people who are TERRIBLY sniffy about the horrid lagered-up oiks, who sink a couple of bottles of TERRIBLY nice red four times a week and are horrible to their partners. It’s just, that’s not all over telly or social media so their ability to pretend they’re better remains safely intact.

    • If you go to watch Rugby at say Twickenham the level of drunkardness is very high.. I’ve been part of it myself. But you rarely see the violence, racism and general twattery you get at the football.

      They are in the minority sure and there’s loads of normal fans, but it’s the white working class element that’s responsible. Like someone said further up, repeated in every shit city centre pub on a Saturday night

      • Yes but as a proportion of the population, far far *far* fewer people are watching it. A smaller cross section, and much smaller absolute numbers.

        Sorry but “oof” is the only response to the “white working class” part of that post. Are you saying working class people are inherently more violent?

        The worst public behaviour I’ve ever seen has been from public-school rugby “lads”. They’re just fortunately very small in number. And their mates run the country and the newspapers.

        • Fucking hell. You really are Dave Spart, aren’t you.

          I’ve been to multiple Big Rugby matches with nary a scent of trouble.

          I went to the Abbey Stadium for one game – let’s just say the crowd was a lot smaller. Caught in the middle of a fight between the home fans after Robbie Turner got sent off.
          We went to a dfferent stand for the next game, and the same thing happened.

          Clearly I have just been unlucky and part of some random statistical freak phenomena

        • I’m saying most violent racist football fans are white working class.
          This doesn’t mean of course “all white working class people are like this.”
          There’s no other sport attracts fans like this except football.

      • I seem to recall that a significant proportion of convicted football hooligans, in the ’80s heyday of the travelling hooligan “firms”, turned out to be lower-to-middle level white-collar workers.

  18. I don’t hate football, I’m just completely indifferent to it. No interest at all. Nor Rugby Union, nor indeed most sport, bar cricket. Spent a pleasant – and within the regs – evening talking to friends outside last night, whilst those that wanted to watch the match did.

    Great shame they lost.

    If England had won, it would have been fascinating to watch and see if our so-called Prime Minister could make political capital out of it, when Southgate and his team – if I’ve read social media right – seemed to have placed themselves in a position where much of what the team stood for would have stuck in Johnson’s craw and all his fellow-travellers in our glorious press.

  19. I watch football. Hell, I’ll watch most sport when it’s on. I’ve even been converted to mungo ball over here.

    I may have mentioned before I will be dead and buried, several times, before I even consider supporting England. But the current mob and their manager make it very difficult to dislike them, and some of them seem exceptional young men.

    I hate Man U even more than other clubs because of an incident in about 1985 when we were trying to leave the school premises to get on a bus and the nice misunderstood statistical outliers (acc HedgePig) defcied to barricade themselves inside the local nightclub, having broken it, and commence throwing bottles at us. I was 14. But even I have to admit to having all the time in the world for Neville G – clearly a man with a moral code who’s not afraid to use his pulpit.

  20. Not a football fan myself (why do I feel the need to state that upfront?) and it’s always been the element of thuggery that put me off. The one football game I ever attended (along with a kindly friend in my youth who was trying to convert me) was notable for that abuse a black player on the opposing team whenever he touched the ball, and I couldn’t believe that was just accepted by everyone.

    Anyway, to put forward a devil’s advocate argument for a second…. Maybe football is the necessary outlet (controlled and limited) for these unpleasant sides of human nature? Maybe these people need to express this, and if they didn’t it would fester and explode in even more sinister ways? Discuss!

    • Re: stating it upfront.

      If, like me, you are a *checks contents of undercrackers* bloke, then I think there’s a sort of base assumption that you must – at the very least – be interested in football. Of my closest male friends, three are and one isn’t.

      I bought something in Halfords on Sunday morning, and the lad behind the counter said as I left ‘have a good evening watching the match’. He looked extremely puzzled when I said I wouldn’t be, as I wasn’t interested.

      • God forbid the lad was only being friendly and was taken aback by an unexpectedly pompous response.

        But Halfords? What are you, some sort of Clarkson petrolhead obsessive? Bloody men.

          • Peter Cook used to tell a story about an interaction he saw on the street once:

            Bloke 1: Scuse me mate, got a light?

            Bloke 2: No, sorry, I don’t smoke.

            Bloke 1: I asked for a light, not your fucking life story.

        • On the other hand it would have been patronising to lie and say ‘Yeah! Can’t wait’ and anyway these checkout staff are told to feign interest in our evenings and weekends, despite generally not giving a toss. So there’s that.

          • I had – very politely – declined his request to give them an email address, to send the receipt to. ‘I’ll have to give you a paper one, then’. ‘Yes, please’.

            I refrained from saying ‘you can have my email address if you pay me for it. £10.00 say?’

            I seem to be a Pooter/E.L Wisty mash-up today. . .

      • Yeah, I tend to get confused and stuttery when someone asks me a loaded football question. I’ve struggled over how to respond to “what team do you support?” without sounding pompous. It’s hard! I’ve realised the best way to answer is just to say I don’t really follow it but I’m from Kilmarnock, and that usually gets people talking about the Kilmarnock team (who in recent years have made a big comeback and are really big in Scottish football now… I gather….).

        • I watch my lad’s team play every weekend. I do my bit by wearing the FA Respect hi-viz and tutting loudly if anyone lights up a cig, or swears (which happens routinely on the pitch and rarely in the crowd).

          One match the home-team linesman had to dash off as his injured son was loaded into an ambulance. The referee handed me his flag. I stuttered “But I don’t know anything about football.” A parent of a visiting away team player stepped forward.

          “But I can restring a guitar” I said to the ref, later.

          • Oh god, that’s the stuff anxiety dreams are made of. Some of the my least memorable Saturday mornings were accompanying my young son to local boys’ team games when he was a goalie, and just trying to avoid football chat with the rest of the dads and praying I wouldn’t get asked to volunteer for anything.

            • Reminds me of being roped in as a linesman at a game a mate was playing in for his work team. I have never had much interest in football, so wouldn’t have known what the hell I was doing at the best of times. Both he and I were off our nuts on Acid at the time (it was the late ’60s, you dig?). An interesting experience. We both got away with it, just.

  21. As noted on the Football thread which Vulpes kindly re-posted here, I don’t really follow England any more.

    There are myriad reasons for that. They began to lose me somewhere around the Beckhams’ World Cup party in 2006, and probably lost me fully when John Terry continued to wear the shirt after the Anton Ferdinand thing. I don’t like a section of the support, the venality of the FA or the stuff that gets stirred in this country whenever they do well, and which we saw again this week. I particularly don’t like the Qatar World Cup, or the fact that – on current trajectory – all the same people who have spent the last month being lauded for their progressiveness will merrily board the flight out there next Winter, to play in a bent tournament, inside stadia built by slaves in a country to which LGBT people cannot safely travel.

    So, I watch them, and I hope they win because it will make everyone here happy and provoke a party, but whatever spark I once felt for them (and – if I’m honest – it was much more than a spark) has long since expired. I certainly don’t feel resentment or condescension for anyone who has supported them these last few weeks, or who rode that rollercoaster last night. It’s good for people to feel things en masse; it’s healthy, even if it provokes dickheads to be dickheads.

    On that basis – I get it. And I get that it can grate when you don’t enjoy something and you have to endure a month of everyone else talking about it non stop, and – frankly – going scarily mental over it.

    I find it eyebrow raising to continually hear what a great individual Gareth Southgate is, when 24 hours before the final he contributed probably the single stupidest and most ill-thought through statement I’ve heard from an England manager since Glenn Hoddle:

    “People have tried to invade us and we’ve had the courage to hold that back. You can’t hide that energy in the stadium against Germany was because of that. I never mentioned that to the players, but I know that’s part of what the story was.”

    Proof positive you can take a knee and still be thick as mince and have zero understanding of how racism in this country actually works. Just an irretrievably daft thing to say that would have had people foaming at the mouth had, for example, the Prime Minister said it (and indeed it does sound like the kind of nonsense he might spout).

    However…. the England national team and the mania that surrounds it isn’t “football”, any more than Phil Spector and every rapey rock star is “music”. Sure, it’s a part of football, but only a part. To condemn the whole because of the actions of a tiny minority is plainly daft. So is the stuff about domestic abuse; what’s the inference, that we should avoid doing anything to make anyone feel stuff in case it triggers someone? There’s quite a bit of music out there that glorifies violence/coercive control, or was recorded by woman-beaters. Who knows what the impact of that has been down the years. What about angry sounding music – don’t want to be taking any chances. The domestic abuse stat has been waved around by people who don’t like football as if it’s evidence of a profoundly corruptive influence, whereas really it’s just evidence that horrible bastards who beat their partners don’t take much provocation to do so.

    Watching what happened last night and concluding that it’s the fault of football, as a sport, and therefore confirms all your existing prejudices strikes me as a bit like surveying the scene at Altamont, or the literal rape and riots at Woodstock 99 and deciding that – yes – this is all evidence that, just as suspected, music is inherently awful. You can do down that road with your thinking, but it’s not exactly a balanced assessment.

    Football, as covered by the other thread, is magical. It drags along with it all sorts of negatives, all sorts of bad behaviour, stupidity, corruption and general grossness. But the sport that sits at the heart remains a thing of beauty; just read in that thread the happy memories it’s provided for people down the years, and look at the smiles it’s put on faces around this country in the last month.

    You’re not obliged to like football. No one is obliged to like anything. But l don’t think disliking it is some sort of moral watermark, nor do I think it makes sense to damn the whole after a month where the sport, and the England team, to give them their due, have done an awful lot of good if you’d care to see it.

    We had a few guests round for the game last night. When Saka missed the final pen last night (and Jesus, of all the outcomes available, that was the one I was most hoping to avoid), I was left with a houseful of suddenly despondent children who had been expecting to be dancing in the street and were left with the gut punch that only a failed shoot out can deliver. Our response was to give them sprinted piggy backs up the road and then hold our own penalty shoot out in the garden. In 30 minutes they went from cheering, to tears and then back to smiles. That’s football, and no amount of twattery will make it otherwise.

    • That’s a good post. Enjoying other nations is attractive without all that baggage, it’s just football. I guess other nations have their own baggage too but as far as I am aware, not to the same degree that one feels embarrassed by how it all looks to people from other countries, visiting the UK for matches, or just generally.

    • Your mention of Qatar is a welcome reminder that, whilst the current team ( and Rashford in particular) have done and said some laudable things, putting them on pedestals might be a tad premature. For sure, there is no reason to expect anyone, footballers included, to solve all of the world’s problems. But the issue of Qatar ( and frequent holidays in Dubai, for that matter, nevertheless illustrate that the harder issues and choices are largely avoided. Something that was made clear when Mesut Ozil complained about the treatment of the Uighurs and was swiftly thrown under a bus by Arsenal whilst he peers remained silent.

      • We should be boycotting that World Cup instead of sat waiting to see if the Norwegians pull the trigger. Sportswashing in its most revolting form.

        Ditto the Winter Olympics, on account of the treatment of the Uighurs. If we’re going to take this stuff seriously, let’s take it seriously.

        • Agree with both you guys.

          Empowered by greed and exploitation, next year’s Qatar World Cup
          is the worst kind of sick joke it’s possible to imagine.

          Footballers and their WAGs who sun themselves on the beaches of Dubai while effectively enslaved Indians and Sri Lankans toil for pennies high above them are just
          as bad.

    • Excellent post, Bingo.
      I love the game, but fully accept it’s a magnet for the worst kind of people & behaviour.
      This is frequently ugly & sickening, but it isn’t new & it isn’t intrinsic to England or the UK.
      I could dive into a sociological unpicking of why this occurs, but drunken mobs have been a part of English life for almost as far back as events have been recorded. Victorian newspapers were often filled with stories of mass brawling in towns & cities, with particular regularity at racetracks up & down the country & mass bottle fights at railway stations that frequently left several dead. This in a time of draconian legislation & the death penalty, don’t forget.
      Football is just the recreation with all its associated flim flam that provides the perfect outlet for all of this pent up lunacy today.
      The media, the pundits & the partipants all state how much they love ‘ the passion’ it provokes, but passions can & do easily run out of control, especially when combined with tribalism & industrial quantities of booze & predominantly youngish men, most of whom are not , shall we say, very sophisticated.
      So, then add a final with an 8 o clock kick off , in the summer , in the capital city, that is guaranteed to attract many thousands of overexcited (I’m being polite, here) blokes , who believe some quasi religious event is about to occur ( i.e. ‘It’ is coming home) & who probably don’t have tickets but crave the proximity to the ‘magic’ & they converge on the stadium.
      Moderate chaos ensues, all things considered. No deaths, that we’re aware of, fortunately, but let’s not act surprised about any of this.
      Given the state of the country & the world, it would find another medium to manifest through if it wasn’t football.
      And by the way, the best team on the night won the game.

  23. We’ve all seen footage of drunken supporters behaving like total arses, and yes: it’s depressing. I was in Manchester before the game, and there were a couple of fights, but the atmosphere was generally good natured. The England team has always seemed to attract ‘fans’ who probably don’t even like football that much – they just like a chance to get drunk and dig out their Nazi references.

    In context, though, there are tens of millions of people for whom this tournament has been a wonderful – and safe – celebration. This England team has been inspiring in a way I haven’t really seen in my lifetime; if you’d have said before the tournament that we’d be in a penalty shoot out in the final, few would have given it much credence.

  24. Something that I don’t think has been raised in this excellent thread is the game itself. There ain’t much scoring. There is so much pent up tension magnified many times when the result is down to penalty shootouts.

    • You are right Junior, I think.
      One of the major pluses of the game is that it’s low scoring & won or lost by fine margins (obviously a large factor in its continued minor appeal for many in the USA, unable to conceive of the possibility that a 0-0 could be the best game you’ve seen in years), but it works against mental decorum in the supporters – especially when the fates are against them.
      The focus on a very concentrated few minutes of drama to decide the outcome is almost literally unbearable for some, & they wig out. Makes for great telly, but probably not great behaviour in inebriated hordes.

    • I hate penalty shoot outs. Of course it’s easy to hate them when your team keeps losing on pens, but I hate them all as a neutral because I so want someone to go and win the blimmin’ game.
      It seems in the knockout rounds the shadow of the shootout starts to fall ten minutes before the end of the 90 minutes, with teams sensing extra time approaching and becoming ultra-cautious, then frequently scared rigid during extra time, despite the fact that the thing they fear – a tired or careless mistake – is what’s going to decide the penalties anyway but without the “dying on our feet” element of it happening to n open play.
      Many have said Italy were the best team at the tournament (which they were) or the better side last night (ditto) and so football justice was served, but the best single performance by any team was by Spain against Italy in the previous round.
      You might say they are are an unfortunate side effect of such a low scoring sport – or you may even enjoy the drama – but I think the format of these tournaments, where three draws will get you out of the group and a succession of successful shootouts can get you all the way to the winners’ podium, encourages defensive coaches with no interest in effective possession at this level.

      • Spain were phenomenal against the Italians, and Sergio Busquets in particular gave as good a display from an individual player as we saw all tournament. He’s not a universally well regarded individual, but my god what a player he remains.

        I have to admit: I love penalties.

        Football is a sport about drama and emotion, for many of the reasons Jim has elucidated above. It’s about feeling things in high concentration. That’s what makes it popular, what makes it healthy and what also makes it unhealthy.

        They’re extremely cruel, but I absolutely love that we settle cup games with pens, because they’re the absolute zenith of that tendency towards emotional maximalism.

        I don’t much care for coaches playing for them, and I do think we’re in a phase of top level football at the moment where teams are often over-coached and a little too obsessed with controlling the game for my taste, but I’m not going to deny that I will always put a game on if I hear a shoot out is in the offing.

        It’s been pretty slim pickings watching Arsenal in recent seasons, but one of the high points has been watching Ainsley Maitland Niles take penalties. Very very cool customer, just wish he was as good at everything else.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64hN0i8kfgE

        • As unsatisfactory as many footie fans* find them, pens are way better than the briefly attempted and speedily abandoned golden goal from the 1990s

          * The nice ones who drink wine

  25. I don’t know why players keep trying those stuttering runs. They probably work brilliantly in practice but almost always flop in front of a pumped up crowd.

    Great manager that he is, think GS got his substitutions and designated penalty takers
    badly wrong last night. As everyone else has said, the best team won in the end

    • The stuttering runs are a product of players trying to make the keeper move first. They look bloody awful and stick in the memory when they go wrong, but statistically they’re very effective, hence the current prevalence. It’s a bit like playing out from the back: it looks stupid when it fails and the fans don’t like it, but you can’t really argue with the numbers.

      Jorginho is probably the most high profile practitioner, with his daft little hop. I think it looks bloody stupid and always enjoy when it goes wrong, but he’s taken 40 penalties in his career and scored 34 of them. By comparison, England’s best penalty taker (Kane), who does not muck about with them, has taken 44 and scored 36. It does work.

        • When you look at those numbers you wonder whether the GFW correspondent who asked “If you’re going to sub on penalty takers in the last minute of extra time and you’ve got a squad of 26 why not pick Matt Le Tissier?” doesn’t have a point..

            • Can’t answer that, Foxy but The Graun’s ‘pictures of the match’ photo spread shows him also trying to yank Kane’s shirt off as well.
              By rights, that’s 2 yellows & off.

              • There are some articles around praising Chiellini for doing what was necessary for his team. It seems that experienced defenders simply regard a yellow card as their sole opportunity to foul without serious comeback, and that Chiellini played his at the right time.
                Apparently the main reason the ref didn’t send him off was because it happened a long way from the Italian goal and didn’t prevent a “clear goal scoring opportunity”, which is moot as Saka would have doubtless left him far behind in a foot race. I get why he did it, but it’s so blatantly cynical and anti-football. An over the top dangerous tackle will result in a straight red, so why not this, where there was self-evidently no attempt to play the ball at all.

            • Well he’s just doing what a lot of players have been doing. Pulling shirts, pushing players down, only they usually try to hide what they are up to. In this case it’s out in the open, blatant. Doesn’t really make it any worse. Knowingly accept a yellow card for the good of the cause. Happens all the time.

              • As I said previously, this is why Italy piss me off. There were a few cynical so called “professional fouls” – the guy who went into Jack Grealish’s knee studs up. That could have been career ending. A few summary sendings off would help. And spare me the “Sterling dived” shtick. This is another level of cheating (not that I think he did dive, but that’s another debate I can’t be arsed to have).

                • He didn’t deliberately go into Grealish’s knee studs up. He stood on the ball and slipped into contact with the knee, which is why he wasn’t sent off.

                  I seem to recall that your opinions of such incidents are traditionally based on the decision of the ref and VAR, so thought this information might be of assistance.

      • Worth remembering that Italy have now won a World Cup final (2006) and a Euros final on penalties. They needed penalties to get through against Spain in the semi, too.

        Penalties are fine if you win…so, as an England fan, I hate them. As soon as it went to pens, I sat back and just thought it was over.

          • Yes, there are several high-profile podcasters
            (Barry Glendenning, for example) who believe poor old Joe Hart never recovered from that moment. I’d say Joe’s loss of form was more a concatenation of events, but it definitely contributed.

  26. Just a random thought about penalty shoot outs…would it work if anyone who got booked during the actual game was barred from taking one? And then if there weren’t enough players to take one on one of the sides, well, tough?

  29. The problem is toxic masculinity. It exists everywhere and attaches itself to whatever it can. In England it’s attached to football (ironically with homo erotic tendencies) but in other countries it’s taking advantage of women as if a divine right, keeping them indoors, or maybe just drinking as a badge of honour. Either way, blaming football isn’t the way, it’s like blaming the internet for stupidity.

    I’m not a fan of football but this squad and their manager have shown a good deal more positive attitude than almost all who went before. They are starting to lead by example and I admire them for doing so.

  30. At least it will be the end, for the time being, of all those articles by people who aren’t particularly interested in football, but want something to latch their pet obsessions on to: Gareth Southgate and what we can learn from his management style; Gareth Southgate and a new form of masculinity; what football says about English national identity; the lessons from the England team for Brexit; the lessons for Keir Starmer; why Boris Johnson will/won’t benefit from the result.

    I think it’s safe to say that this tournament showed that football is quite popular really. Not much else.

  31. The deplorable behaviour before and after the game should be sorted out but it’s wrong to damn the 20+ million people who enjoyed the game as if they are part of the problem. As others have said, a big group of people + alcohol and dickheads will emerge. Football does seem to incite a level of passion which exacerbates this I’ll accept but still, judge the dickheads not the vast majority who cause no trouble at all. As for resenting it being on for a month, it’s not like there aren’t other options. I loath rugby and think the Olympics are stupid but it is no effort at all to not see a single second of it when it’s on. Watch something else, read a book, go for a walk. Zen dude.

  32. When the dust has settled and the coked up drunk neanderthals return to wrecking a town near you on a Friday night without football to hide behind. The racist keyboard warriors from 12 years old upwards are being left to get away with it and their dad’s scream abuse at the opposition’s black player while wearing the name of their black player on their backs. When our politicians go back to sending immigrants home and starving the children of those who can’t afford food. Then, maybe then we’ll look back on a quite remarkable tournament that did much to change many views on the game but still clearly not enough. I don’t have an answer to the social ills of our society. I’m not sure anyone does.

    All of the above though has also deflected from the Southgate conundrum. Capable of uniting, organising and squeezing the most of his pragmatism. His Rice / Phillips axis is his and his alone and was a great success. But is that enough with the resources at his disposal?Last night at one nil after 2 minutes Southgate looked shocked. Scoring early is not part of the plan. His system allows goals after 70 minutes, not two. Remember the semi against Croatia? Early goal and inevitable defeat followed. A truly great coach would have seized the advantage at half time. Removing the mostly ineffective Mount and surplus to requirements Trippier taking off the security blanket and going against all his pragmatic instincts injecting, any two from Sancho, Saka, Grealish or Rashford. An aging Italian defence was ripe for attacking on the flanks. Look at Chielinis assault on Saka. If he’d had men running at him all game who knows? Harry Kane didn’t have a shot on goal nor even a touch I the Italian penalty area. Mancini rolled all his dice and his side made it to penalties. This is no Danny Baker rant but asking Sancho and Saka to take penalty 4 and 5 just seems a very strange decision when it now appears others were willing.

    Southgate’s achievements are huge and go beyond football. I admire him as a man and a manager. Whether he is capable of shifting gears though at the big moments we will find out in Qatar if not his approach will.again be ultimately futile. So if we remove the noise and focus just on the football we have for me an opportunity lost and a manager who may have achieved as much as he can. I hope his famous honesty allows him to acknowledge this and let go next time this sort of opportunity presents itself.

  33. I hate the thugs who caused such mayhem in London yesterday. I hate the racists who have been abusing Rashford. Saka and Sancho. I hate the bastards who sing about Munich to Manchester United fans, and make gas chamber hissing sounds to Spurs fans and think it’s ok to sing vile homophobic chants about any player or manager they feel like targeting. I hate being sat in a ground when some knobhead near me is yelling foul, angry, eyeballs out abuse at just about everything around him including his own team for 90 minutes. That happens too often, almost always at top level games.

    I love football. I love the skill of Sterling and Kane and Chiesa in full flight. I love the drama of a game like Croatia v Spain. I love going to a game, whether it’s White Hart Lane, Tottenham or Moss Lane Altrincham. And I love the humour, and the resigned pessimism and the passion and occasional joy of many football fans.

    I don’t see these positions as contradictory. Because whilst football attracts hateful morons – who of course would be there, spreading their bile whether football existed or not – it also attracts all sorts of men women and children for whom it is a passion, and a shared joy. And I’m damned if I’m going to let the haters define the game as ‘theirs’. It belongs to me too, and millions of others who do not view football as a crutch upon which to carry their own inadequacies.

  34. The criminal behaviour/criminal stupidity in the aftermath of ver lads’ Euro 1996 defeat was apparently a whole lot worse than on Sunday night:

    “The night after England lost to Germany in the semi-finals, 40 people were arrested in Trafalgar Square alone, after an actual riot. Across London, there were 200 arrests, which is four times more than this weekend. German cars were vandalised nationwide. In Birmingham, fans smashed up an Aldi. Two Germans were beaten up in Basingstoke. In Sussex, a Russian teenager was stabbed five times after a gang misplaced his accent. In Brighton, seven fans were so distraught they threw themselves off the pier, like pissed lemmings, and had to be rescued by the coastguard.”

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-social-media-warps-our-perspective-w5kt6073w

    It seems that. like death and taxes, the terminally stupid are one of life’s few certainties

  35. The statement from Rashford and the direct tweeted response from Tyrone Mings to Pritti Patel show that these lads are not going away quietly. Hating football is fine with me, but lover or hater of the game this group have the will, the intelligence and the reach to make actual change. All power to them.

  38. Forty-five years ago it would have been inconceivable to believe Peter Shilton to be more intelligent than Margaret Thatcher, Trevor Brooking to have had more life experiences than Shirley Williams, Gordon Hill to be able to out-wit Tony Benn.
    Now it’s an open-and-shut case.

    I’m in absolutely no doubt that the 26 players in this England squad would eclipse their 26 contemporaries in government on every single subject imaginable. Name anything that Fat Boy J. or Priti Patel or Gavin Williamson could do better than Marcus Rashford or Raheem Sterling or Harry Kane.

    Who would you want to be with in an emergency… John Stones or Rees-Smug?

  40. Something’s been bugging me about the OP here and I think it’s this:

    If I get long covid because I was sat next to some twattish maskless football fan in the tube, who should I blame? Spare me this crap about “real fans” just not being like that.

    Is there any other word or phrase that could replace ‘football fan’ and not make this statement blind bigotry? Put in ‘Scotsman’ for example and it’s indefensible.

    • It’s kind of a shame, because there is a really interesting (and arguably much needed) debate to be had about how to improve/detoxify certain aspects of the English fan culture.

      Instead, we’re left discussing the immortal question: are all football fans born pricks or do they take special classes?

    • @Chiz

      Catching long COVID on the tube and working out that you got it from a maskless football fan is a bit of a stretch though.

      Rather like those old Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse sketches where the Self-righteous brothers used to plan their reactions to encounters that were never likely to happen in a gazzillon years:

      “Oi, maskless football fan wiv yer long covid. NO!”

      • “I’ll always remember the buzz coming out of the back alleys near Upton Park. Half a gram of charlie, half a bottle of whiskey and one recent shot of Pfizer in the bloodstream. No masks.

        The other lot show up out of nowhere, but they’re the same muggy crew we battered last season; we know it, and they know it too. Over my shoulder, I see Gasher breathe in one of their faces. He goes down like he’s been shot, and the lads swarm him, exhaling everywhere, no mercy.

        One of them comes running up brandishing a tube of hand sanitiser. I knock it straight out of his hands and step within two metres of him. Bosh! Have that, you slag.

        It was like that every weekend in them days. Band of brothers, we were; facing up to the enemy, never backing off an inch. Marching up Green Street chanting “You’re going home with a soaring temperature”. Best times of my life.”

    • Sorry @chiz, but I don’t buy your analysis of what’s bugging your outraged virtue here.

      Tell me what you realistically expect to be the signs allowing you to recognise a Scotsman on sight. Kilt? Bagpipes? Haggis on a string? Andy Stewart albums under one arm?

      In the OP quote the term ‘football fan’, as I read it, is describing one of the St. George’s flag bunch, maybe clutching a programme and certainly wearing the England team ‘Three Lions’ shirt. An individual instantly recognisable as a ‘football fan’ without any blind bigotry involved.

      Something else may be bugging you about the post, but your insinuation here seems wide of the mark.

        • Indeed he is. And statistically there is highly likely to be at least one Tory voter amongst the current England squad, but the principle at issue here is whether it’s appropriate to piggy back off the work of a class of people you’ve denigrated (even if, as in Patel’s case, you are a member of such class).

          Regardless, here’s one of the other co-authors of Three Lions on the day of the last General Election:

          “Here’s the thing, progressives: if you want to vote Labour, do so. But don’t tell Jews that you’re doing it *despite* the anti-Semitism thing; that you know that’s very shameful, but in the grand scheme of things etc etc. Because all we hear is: Jews don’t count.”

          I would expect this logic has to work in both directions, or not at all.

            • In a recent exposé, it was revealed that Keith Allen is a believer in the “static Earth” model of Flat Earth theory and, having an aversion to spicy foods which cause him tremendous intestinal discomfort, he has never eaten Vindaloo.

            • To adopt the language of the article: the class of people born in England but eligible to play football for another country (more than one, in Patel’s case).

              It is my secret hope that she one day utilises that eligibility. What a twist.

              • Thanks for the clarification. The language of the thread, (rather than the article, which doesn’t mention class), led me to thinking the reference was to social class, rather than the less loaded term ‘category’. I’d say Patel was definitely Daily Mail-reading middle class, but then I am a frightful snob.

            • Patel is dyed in the wool merchant class – her family were refugees from Amin’s Uganda .
              She is not keen on having it pointed out that under the regulations she has overseen, that same family would have been denied entry to the UK.
              So apart from costing the public money in compensation to civil servants she was adjudged to have bullied in the workplace, her track record of hypocrisy predates her recent fascistic comments about footballers taking the knee.

                  • I don’t think it necessarily changes your valid point that Patel has instituted restrictions on access to the UK that could have prevented her parents’ entry – it would depend on whether they met the salary threshold, I suppose.

                    My sense is she is the equivalent of a Grantham grocer’s daughter.

                    • I’m not sure it’s that odd – presumably she is like most of us in getting our values from her upbringing. We see ourselves in the groups we want to see ourselves in.

                    • If you want to hear “robust” views about immigration – and why wouldn’t you? – ask an immigrant or, better still, the child of immigrants. Ain’t that right Mr Yaxley-Lennon?

                      This idea that immigrants all somehow stick up for each other is pitifully naiive.

                    • I know I’d adore a holiday on the southern Italian coast – it’s been absolutely pissing it down all day long here.
                      Honesty – it rains in England and then Johnson farts it all over central Europe.

                      A zimmer? With my back? Now that would be a treat.

                    • The groups we want to see ourselves in, bea part of, are often not from our upbringing, they can be any group we find orselves among and that can change throughout life. A lot of people like pp find a group that works for them and they are loyal to it, they don’t even have to believe in it. It can be for convenience, it gives them power and wealth maybe. You play the required role and reap the rewards.

              • With all due respect (and I genuinely mean that), while I’m not here to defend Priti Patel – she seems fairly horrible and I certainly wouldn’t vote for her – the hyprocrisy accusation sits really poorly with me.

                The children of immigrants aren’t required to draw their political views from a prescribed pool, or morally limited by their parentage. Priti Patel was born in this country and she’s just as entitled as anyone else to a wrong opinion.

                She has not, as suggested below, “instituted restrictions on access to the UK that could have prevented her parents’ entry”, because her parents arrived in this country in 1960 and Patel is instituting restrictions today, in a completely different world.

                Patel herself did not choose to migrate to the UK. She had no choice in where she was born. She has not taken an action that she is refusing to permit for others. We may suggest that she’s benefitted from her parents taking that action, but that logic seems to me to come perilously close to suggesting she should be grateful for having been born here at all, and ought to reign it in accordingly.

                My sense with Priti Patel is that she has reached her views honestly and with just as much intellectual rigour as I have reached my own (possibly not saying much). I don’t believe they’re hypocritical because of actions her parents took half a century ago. Wrong, but not hypocritical.

                I’m also not a fan of this stuff more generally. Countless privately educated Labour MPs would like to end private schooling in this country. I have absolutely zero problem with that; their job is to take the actions they believe will improve the wellbeing of the nation, not to nervously counter-weigh their own upbringings. We can’t have change unless we break with the past, and if we’re going to break with the past we need to allow some moral latitude for our opponents to do similarly.

                Likewise, many of us will have had the advantage of laws that we would prefer were changed, not least in the field of taxation. Again, I don’t see that as hypocritical.

                If Patel had spent 20 years smuggling people into the UK, it would be a fair point. But she hasn’t – all she did was arrive on the planet here. She can think what she likes. She’s unpleasant and incorrect, but she’s not (on the facts I’m aware of) a hypocrite.

                Obviously, I look like a prick now because I’m perilously close to defending someone everyone hates, but – and I’d like to be clear here – I’m not defending her. I’m defending the principle. And there’s a big difference.

                Hopefully, this doesn’t come across as overly adversarial. That’s not the intention, although it’s difficult to avoid that impression sometimes with the written word. I just felt uncomfortable about the hypocrisy thing and thought I’d try to explain why.

                • Sorry Bingo but you talking bollox. You’re like some shady lawyer who gets a celebrity off a speeding fine because the policeman forgot to sign the ticket. Of course Patel has every right to pay no attention to her parents circumstances and political views. But you can’t get away from the fact that she’s introducing legislation that would have made her parents settling in the UK almost impossible. Also she is a complete shit.

                  • I’m not denying that she’s a complete shit. I literally said above that she’s unpleasant and wrong.

                    I’m denying she’s a hypocrite.

                    I’m also not a shady lawyer; I’m a very flash, expensive one.

                • I don’t think Bingo is talking bollox. If you want to attack somebody’s words, actions and behaviour, (which I think all in this thread agree is right to do in this case), it is important to get it right and play on a level field – she isn’t responsible for her parents’ (words , actions and behaviour).

                  There’s enough shooting in the foot on FB with people thinking it’s OK to wish all sorts of horrible things on her – of course it isn’t. I don’t think we get as extreme here, but it is easy to get carried away with emotion – and then she’s basically won.

                  I think Bingo, you were responding to JungleJim (tracing margins upwards), but you also referenced my words. In a similar way that Marty McFly couldn’t really go back in time and marry his mother or invent rock’n’roll, Priti (much as she might look like the Wicked Witch of the West) cannot retrospectively rewrite Hansard in 1960. On my part, it was meant as an ironic comment – what might have been.

                  Now it is possible that, had she been RA Butler or Jim Callaghan or any of the other sexy sixties Home Secretaries in between, she might have had a refreshing open attitude to immigration – white heat of technology and a country in need of a labour force as the boomers reached adulthood. My suspicion is that she is stupid but sly, so would have done what went well with Daily Mail readers.

                  But it is equally possible that, given a better calibre of Prime Minster and cabinet appointer of the time, she wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the reins of power and instead would have been to be found addressing a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham 1968.

                  • Thanks, sal – your first two paras very much capture the spirit of what I’m trying to get across.

                    Words are important, and we should use them carefully and in a manner we’d be willing to accept if we were to find ourselves on the other end of the debate. Because, almost inevitably, we one day will.

                    Re: your final para, she would of course have got nowhere near the cabinet in the 1960s for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the caliber of political leadership.

                    • Let me slap your back and thank you in return.

                      Re my final paragraph – I make the rules for my own hypotheticals and set an internal logic that sidesteps inconvenient truths like the racism that wouldn’t have let her into power, but would have let her parents into the country. I’m thinking Sam Beckett here – and not the one waiting for the bus to Godot.

                      Anyway – why aren’t you posting some Jessie Reyez on my Colombians post? I namechecked you and all, It’s an empty concert hall echoing with just KFD and me chucking YT links at each other, It’s almost like AWers don’t really love Latin American pop.

                    • I’m still confused Bingo (nothing new there). My Dad was a Union Man till his dying day even refusing to buy his council house for 45p and selling it for 50 grand. I’m more of a wishy-washy liberal myself. But if I got myself elected as the Green MP for Aberdeen North and then proposed we demolish all the council estates and turn them into posh flats for the super rich then I’m pretty certain the Press & Journal would label me as a hypocrite. Your roots are your roots even though you now grow in a different garden.

                    • They might, but they’d be wrong.

                      My father was awarded the OBE a few years ago. I am a howling Republican and I don’t believe in the honours system at all. I would gladly burn the palace to the ground. We’re two separate human beings, it’s OK.

                      My mother is an immigrant; one of the first Latin Americans allowed into this country when they changed the laws in the early 70s. I still reserve the right to hold whatever view I want on immigration, and in fact what set me off here is that I know exactly what she’d say to all of this: tell them to piss off and think whatever you like. It’s your conscience, not theirs.

                    • Your roots are embedded in soil culture – which can be rich or impoverished, dry, moist or flooded, shallow or deep. Moreover, those roots are fed or not by the roots of other species in the same soil – the wood wide web as it is known. All of those subsurface factors strengthen or weaken the visible plant as it reaches out for the light.

                      Patel is a Conservative MP in an ultra safe seat. The only way she could be a hypocrite in the manner of your Aberdonian Green MP breaking manifesto commitments would be if she put compulsory purchase orders on all the mansions in Wickham Bishops and converted them to council flats.

                    • So, last try. As far as I can tell Patel’s parents under her proposed legislation would have found it at best very difficult and at worst impossible to settle in the UK. If that’s not hypocritical then my name’s not Johnny Jammydodger

                    • The essential element in well-drained soil is oxygen, which is just as important as water in growing healthy plants. Soil that is water-logged does not drain well and is anaerobic (oxygen deficient) resulting in drowned and rotted roots.
                      In addition to enabling more oxygen to get to plant roots, there is another great benefit to improving drainage: it takes more heat to warm up water than it does to warm up soil, so you can count on an earlier start to your planting season if your soil isn’t water-logged.
                      Mulching can do miracles for your soil. This method does take time to work, but it can be very effective if done right. Mulch holds onto water very well, breaks down and decomposes slowly, protects the soil from baking which is one of the reasons it gets hard in the first place, and it allows worms and other garden insects to feed on the slowly breaking down material. This softens soil, and in between two and four years you should have perfectly loose soil.

                    • Thanks for the quotes on soil culture, Gary. I suppose there’s an OP connection with a well-kept football pitch, but who cares.
                      Water = comments, Oxygen = views – yes that adds well to the analogy. And we’ve got 690+ pages of steadily composting ‘mulch’

                      I suppose that makes Moose the worm, weaving his way through the archives, bringing up nuggets of wormcast to the surface to enrich the ongoing exchange.

                    • First of all, thanks to Gary for clearing this matter up
                      Secondly, Sal – my admittedly poorly expressed analogy re me knocking down council houses was not that a Green MP done it. The hypocrisy lay in it being knocked down by the son of a man who refused to take Thatcher’s offer of 45p for his house because he wanted that house to be passed on to another working-class family not some hapless pair of yuppies looking for a bijou flat close to local amenities. The very definition of hypocrisy you must agree…

                    • I’m not sure you’re a hypocrite for not hewing to your parent’s values.

                      It does smack of “haul inboard Jack, I’m alright” which is distasteful It’s doubly so for killing the things that gave you your start in life, denying that opportunity to others, when there is no good reason behind for it.

                      That’s shitfuckery of the highest order.

                    • I think the above has confirmed for me what has been making me so uncomfortable throughout this discussion.

                      Priti Patel was not given an “opportunity” or “her start in life”. She’s not an immigrant. She was born here and she’s as British as anyone else.

                    • Priti Patel wasn’t given any more “opportunity” or “start in life” than any other British person, because she is one. A lot of people really telling on themselves here.

                    • At the huge risk of boring this subject to death – I really don’t see what’s wrong with criticising Patel for bringing in legislation that would have most probably meant her parents would not have been allowed to settle in the UK. Nothing to do with her parents’ beliefs or her political views. If her parents had been banned from entry, she wouldn’t be British.

                    • At no point in this thread has anyone suggested that Patel and her policies shouldn’t be subject to criticism.

                      The issue which I’m repeatedly raising here is that the tone of some of the criticism (almost certainly inadvertently) implies that Patel herself is an immigrant, which she is not.

                      If Patel’s parents were barred entry she almost certainly wouldn’t exist. The Patel who does exist is British, and no amount of thought experiments will make her less so.

                      This might seem trivial to you, but it’s not trivial to me, for reasons expressed upthread.

                    • Can’t see much if any sign of anybody suggesting Patel is an immigrant or British. Britain gave her family the opportunity to start a new life and they seemed to have prospered – good on them. Isn’t it athe very least ironic she is trying to stop a similar opportunity to build a new life?

                    • I’m not talking about irony. I’m talking about the allegation of hypocrisy.

                      “Britain gave her family the opportunity to start a new life”.

                      Britain didn’t “give” Priti Patel anything. She was born here and she’s British. She is not external to Britain, she’s part of it. She has not been given an “opportunity” or a “start in life” any more than any other person born in this country.

                      Read the definition of hypocrisy Dave has helpfully provided below. The only way Patel’s treatment of immigrants can be said to be hypocritical is if one assumes she effectively is an immigrant herself by virtue of her parents. That’s not how it works; her cultural background is different to theirs and they can’t be bundled together for convenience.

                    • If you think it doesn’t matter she’s the daughter of an immigrant bringing in anti-i migration legislation then we’ll have to agree to disagree. Yours respectfully, Johnny Jammydodger

                    • If you think that Sufjan Stevens released the album of the year in 2015 then… I’m not going to disagree with you, you handsome bastard. Yours equally respectfully, Sammy Sickofstrawmen.

                    • That’s pritti persuasion. Anti-i migration? You mean she favours analogue migration? It sure is a lot to get your head around.

  43. Official reason for there being no reception at Downing Street:
    Fat Boy J. is working on his “levelling-up” speech. Brilliant!

    Actual reason for there being no reception at Downing Street:
    26 self-made individuals, who FBJ isn’t fit to lick the shoes of, think he’s an Eton bell-end.

      • We have a curious phenomenon here in Ireland where folk who worship Steven Gerard or Paul Scholes will immediately hate and wish ill upon them when they pull on an England jersey.
        You appear to have taken the opposite course DD: your admiration for these fine self-made individuals seems at odds with your oft-expressed contempt for top level English football..?

  44. Can’t seem to answer the hypocrite conversation so I’ll leave this definition here

    “Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles”

    . I’m on the not hypocrite team on the issue of immigration but i have no doubt she’s a hypocrite on other issues. The England football team fior example as Tyrone Mings so eloquently explained. I have no doubt about her lying, cheating and bullying though…

    • Indeed, Dave. Apparently one can be a hypocrite in terms of some subjects, but not a hypocrite on others. And there was I thinking that a locksmith’s a locksmith, a thief’s a thief, and a hypocrite’s a hypocrite.

  46. That post from Moose is carrying a lot of weight (just my unnecessary interlude into horticulture added a lot of weight to the thread). Rather than just pinning another comment to the end, I thought I’d continue here.

    I’d already agreed with Bingo that Patel has no obligation to imitate her parents at all.
    “The children of immigrants aren’t required to draw their political views from a prescribed pool, or morally limited by their parentage. Priti Patel was born in this country and she’s just as entitled as anyone else to a wrong opinion”.

    She’s clearly British. By birth, she’s a Londoner – that’s her ‘start in life’. The ‘opportunity’, such as it was, was given to her parents. By definition, she’s also a second generation immigrant. But this is a provocative term that binds her identity to that of her parents. When do you stop getting pinned to, referenced by, your parents’ lives and start being defined by your own? Tabula rasa?

    Nationality? I thought I was a European. Brexit has made me an immigrant, as Gary kindly alluded to, as is Lodestone, KFD, etc, etc. This is part of who we are, though we probably don’t think it defines us beyond all else. My children, I suppose, are half-immigrant, although they would claim to be just German (and who would blame them right now?).

    Labelling and identity – ‘othering’ – give a dog a bad name and beat it. I am an expat, you are an immigrant, he is a refugee, she is an economic migrant, they are illegal aliens. What weight do these definitions carry? Patel beats a lot of metaphorical dogs, and it’s not pleasant. But it’s not hypocrisy.

  47. The hypocrisy thing aside, Priti Vacant’s dissing of the England squad ahead of a tournament in which host teams usually go far – a fact cynical pols are only too happy to seize on by donning “the shirt” – was not terribly bright.

    On the subject of not terribly bright, has Danny Baker managed to get his foot out of his mouth yet? Can’t be easy when you’re wrapped up in three Ingerland shirts

      • I haven’t read that but I know it’s by Brendan O’Neill therefore ordure of the finest quality.

        My 2p, I don’t really see anything hypocritical about PP bringing in legislation which would have prevented her parents from coming to the UK. It might be odd or it might be conviction but I’m not sure it’s hypocritical. But anyone conflating PP and “immigrants” needs to have a quiet chat with themselves. She’s as British as we are and you might not like it but it’s fact and we are allowed to not agree with each other.

        By the way I don’t agree with her on pretty much everything and that’s OK too.

        • She’s as British as the Windrush folks who were deported and who have still to be restituted under her power:
          “By April 2020, the Windrush taskforce, which was set up to deal with applications from people who were wrongly categorised as illegal immigrants, still had 3,720 outstanding cases. 1,111 of these cases had yet to be considered, more than 150 of these had waited for over six months, and thirty-five had waited for over a year for a response. The Home Office revealed that it had thus far identified 164 people from Caribbean countries who it had wrongly detained or deported. Twenty-four people who had been wrongly deported had died before the UK government had been able to contact them, fourteen people who had been wrongly deported to the Caribbean, had thus far not been traced. Officials refused to attempt to trace people who had been wrongly deported to non-Caribbean Commonwealth countries. Up to that date thirty-five people had been granted “urgent and exceptional support” payments, totalling £46,795.[123]”

          By October 2020, nine victims had died without receiving their compensation; many others had yet to receive compensation.[124]

        • The Windrush immigrants were *immigrants*, resident but not born here. Priti Patel is as British as I am. That appalling scandal has no relevance here.

          Ah for fuck’s sake what’s the point?

  48. Serious question about football.

    I believe that the events of Sunday WRT to ‘fans’ behaviour has really put the mockers on the chances of England being awarded the hosting of a World Cup in the future.

    Any thoughts/comments?

    • It doesn’t help a great deal of course, but I don’t believe it kiboshes the FA’s joint bid with the Irish FA to host the 2030 World Cup.

      FIFA are currently considering making the WC a bi-annual event to increase their revenue, and that would effectively terminate the confederation cups like the Euros and the Copa America. It is an indication of how little notice FIFA takes of its constituent’s own tournaments, over which it has little or no jurisdiction. Crowd trouble in England at a UEFA tournament will be seen as not FIFA’s problem, simply because it’s not them running that show.

      The other main contender for 2030 currently is a joint Spain/Portugal bid, but given FIFA’s recent record of being easily swayed by having vast amounts of money thrown at it (hello Qatar, Russia, and the forthcoming US/Canada/Mexico World Cup) then I suspect the bid winner will ultimately be the highest financial bidder, rather than the most organised. If England/Ireland can fund it sufficiently, then they still have an excellent chance of winning the bid.

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