By Tony Attwood
And so a new “football” is added. No longer an11 a-side or even a 5-a-side game, but rather a seven a side women’s game.
The games will be 30 minutes long, played across two halves of, hang on a minute while I calculate this, oh yes quarter of an hour each, on a pitch around 50 metres long but I have no idea how wide.
The goals will be smaller too, and there are eight teams going to take part in groups of course because these days we always have to have groups. Err…. actually, I am not sure that is football. Not even “new” football. But it is being played over three days in Portugal, and here’s an innovation – it is being played on grass but in a stadium built inside another stadium, near Lisbon, and as a build-up to to Women’s Champions League final being played the day after the whatever it is to be called final.
Oh yes, and there is a story that a second “series” (it has to be a series now because America is involved) will be held at the end of the year in America. And it is being run by the owner of Gotham FC, which I think is the home of Batman, so I suspect he is involved too.
And Robin.
Meanwhile, as you may have noted Arsenal’s women’s team lost 2-0 away to Real Mad in a game played on mud in the quarter-finals of the Champs League. Ian Wright called the pitch “worse than Derby’s” which is saying something. He also called it a “fucking disgrace”. And even the austere and rather proper Daily Telegraph that your granddad might read said, “Wright is not wrong.” Although it still insists on writing his comment as a “f****** disgrace” as some of these old timers (which actually now I think of it includes me) might be a little distressed at seeing the word written out in full.
According to the report, “This Real Madrid surface was barely acceptable for a Sunday League match.”
And yet, amazingly no voice is raised against the organisers of the match – Uefa. Uefa’s work is still reported in this and every other paper as being “a good thing” with no suggestion that if they can’t actually get this match played on a football pitch, they are clearly incompetent and incapable of running a whole series of matches, and if players, clubs and countries had any guts about them, they would pull out and set up a new agency.
Meanwhile, the Guardian tells us that Gareth Southgate reckons that “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers are taking the place of traditional father figures in society and contributing to mental health issues among young men.”
And well, yes, of course that’s right. We know that. And indeed he was also right in saying that the notion that “winning a trophy is the only marker of success” is not a viable way to see the world.
The reality is that we all want our team to win, our children to succeed, our lovers to be kind and beautiful, our books, articles, songs, dancing and writing to be praised (while mine at least), our friends to be doing well and Tottenham Hots to be losing. But beyond that most of us (or at least most of us who are capable to taking a broader view of reality) know that only one team wins the league each season and most of us never get the praise we might like to think we deserve. As he said…
“There’s one topic that keeps being brought to my attention. And it’s parents who keep raising it. Young men are suffering. They are feeling isolated. They’re grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society.”
Now he put that down to “a lack of mentors – or ‘father figures’ – which “are causing more young men to become reluctant to talk or express their emotions.”
I am sure that is true, but I’m also pretty sure there is more to it than that. Because no one seems to be doing anything to help young men express their emotions in a meaningful way. I might be out of touch with education but I am not too sure there is anything happening in schooling, or in informal education outside schools where emotions are explored.
Emotions are of course central to supporting a football team – but even here if we look at the way Arsenal is reported on, there is very little in the way of positive emotion being expressed. Arsenal come second for two seasons running, and might come second for a third season too, but the prime media response seems to be “sack the manager and ditch some of the players”.
As a result the manager who has been successful in comparison with what has gone on in recent years, is being blamed for failure and we are told he should be replaced.
And when I write or say such things, what happens is that I get the response “so you think coming second is a trophy,” which of course is just more mindless gibberish.
In many regards this is, as Bob Dylan sang, a world gone wrong,
