Source: FOOTYMAD
Football Fatigue.
It's not just the bewildering incompetence of Scottish football that is depressing, it's the sport itself which causes frustration and dissatisfaction. Watching football is becoming a tedious pastime, especially if a spectator has no allegiance. The commitment of the regular fan can allow him to gloss over the game's shortcomings, but when the sport is looked at from a neutral perspective, it is often dull, unadventurous, predictable and ordinary.The fare served up by the Scottish international side against Liechtenstein was hopelessly dire; the team resembled a navy blue army of traffic cones, but with less flair, and the contest showed, as many others have done in the past, that football's favourites are frequently over-rated. It's possible for well-organised teams of hearty triers to upset the odds - as Clyde did not so long ago against a Celtic side with Roy Keane gracing it.Some will argue that this is the beauty of the game, but while unpredictability is welcome in the sport, we have to wonder why so much investment is made in footballers who are not significantly better than ordinary fit young men who play the game as a pleasing distraction from their main occupation.In almost any sport, enthusiastic amateurs can't live with dedicated professionals, but in football, teams comprising waiters, mechanics, drivers and tradesmen can occasionally respectably compete with highly-paid professional sportsmen. The gulf in financial rewards is colossal, and yet the difference between professionals and hard-working part-timers is not as it should be, and this is a curiosity in the sport.The recent World Cup won't be remembered with great affection, and there's a good reason for that; it was ordinary at best and woeful at worst, and while the football public will always have a fascination for major tournaments, not many converts will have been won over by a competition which rarely rose above the bland and ordinary.At its best, football is a great sport, but there's too much tedium between the odd flurry of excitement in the modern game, and we should expect the football authories to address this, hopefully with wisdom to the fore.The tactical aspect of the modern game is mostly about the negative, and this usually involves teams crowding the half in which they are defending. Whilst this is understandable - up to a point - the spectacle for supporters is frequently absent. The game is played sideways with occasional speculative and frequently unsuccessful forward passes, and wearing down the opposition seems to have taken precedence over actually outplaying opponents with watchable and skilful football.The present Scotland side can be dismally bad, but even the best team in the modern international game, Spain, could only dismiss Liechtenstein by a four-goal margin. There was a time when the elite in the game would outclass and destroy lowly opponents, but now we see leading nations huffing and puffing to blow lesser lights away, even although their players are portrayed as superstars worthy of a king's ransom.While we rightly complain about the state of our national game, we tend to laud those who appear on the big stage, but the top guns in the world game can serve up dross too, and the last World Cup proved this fairly conclusively.The game has evolved into a sport that is vastly different from the spectacle which managed to excite tens of thousands of working people in bygone days. Take away allegiance and there's little to enthuse about in football today, and this isn't sustainable at the prices the game expects its public to pay.In their hearts, people know that the "product" is tired. Take a look around Ibrox on a matchday and it's evident that the crowd isn't enraptured by what is being played out before it. Thousands are eager to leave before the end and a decent number will have arrived late. Folk spend time chatting with friends and consuming snacks, and the game rarely focuses attention for more than a few minutes at a time.The Ibrox tannoy blares out a disturbing cacophany: to hard-sell to supporters and censor them at the same time. The fun factor of being a supporter has been crushed by a loudspeaker intrusion which isn't wanted or required. Half-time mobile phone conversations compete unfavourably with an officially-sanctioned objectionable racket. Attending football has become an expression of loyalty, as much, if not more than, a means of seeking genuine entertainment. The admission charge for entry is a tax on the faithful as much as a ticket to a theatre of dreams, and we must wonder how long this will be tolerated by an increasingly discerning public.Football has become hyped-up, overpaid ordinariness, and the real winners in the sport today are the players, the management teams, and of course that unnececessary but expensive group of people known as agents. Not one farthing should be wasted by football clubs on agents. If players insist on using them, let them pay them directly.This is where football is at; it spends money it doesn't have on players who aren't worth the fees or wages offered, it throws cash at agents for stringing coherent sentences together rather than having to deal directly with monosyllabic footballers; the players state the bleedin' obvious when they are dragged in front of television cameras, and press conferences are held to allow managers to mutter tired old stock phrases to a bored sporting media."The boys are up for it - they'll give 110% in the game - the opposition are a good side - it's always a difficult place to go - Joe Bloggs is a great young manager" - and so it continues - interminably.Maybe this is why we couldn't ignore Brian Clough all those years ago - he was genuinely interesting and entertaining as well as being one of the greatest managers the game in Britain has ever known.The modern game is more monochrome than than the black and white coverage it used to enjoy before colour television became widespread. It lacks flair, individuality and the kind of characters who say what they think rather than what they think they should say. The game in England is awash with cash, while Scottish football is impoverished and as poor financially as its international side is on the pitch, but the corporate mindset that prevails in the sport is as repulsive north of the border as it is from Carlisle down. The game has lost its soul and become shallow, insipid and dull; it is a shadow of what it was before before hundreds of millions of pounds were gifted to it to squander recklessly. I like what football can be, but I'm not sure I like what football has become.
