Can't be bothered anymore

[Vision]

No good can ever come of following double barrelled clubs.

Windsor & Eton ; Hampton & Richmond. I mean make up your oxf*rd' minds.

Thames Valley Royals had more integrity.

[Royal Lady]

No good can ever come of following double barrelled clubs.

Windsor & Eton ; Hampton & Richmond. I mean make up your oxf*rd' minds.

Thames Valley Royals had more integrity.

Yeah, cos that's, like, cheating - because they can take their pick of the crop of talent from both Windsor AND Eton and Hampton AND Richmond.

[Tredder]

You want to get yourselves down to Hampton and Richmond with me.

You can drink during the game, the team aren't bad and they've got one of the most active impaired mobility firms (Beaver Road Bennys) in non-league football.

You must hide everytime i come close to emptying my glass, it's got far more attractions than the firm, the bloke from the bill that mans the freebie entrance gate, Paul Merton in his duffel coat and a genuine midget in a beaver outfit.

[Ark Royal]

In my opinion, none of it is a surprise really, is it? As Foch says, we have the look of a club that is everything that is wrong about modern football today. As soon as Justice Taylor decided to go all-seat, as soon as the old 'big five' got their wishes granted with the formation of the Premiership, as soon as Murdoch and his rapacious pay-tv execs saw a market open up for them, any pretence that a once solid and quite beautiful (I don't care that is was sometime violent or dirty or unpleasant - it was simply FUN) sport would survive as anything less than a Disney-fied and over-exaggerated pantomime of what it once was, was gone.

Going to games now is similar to going to a school fete, or some 'on ice' spectacular with fat provincials in cheap suits or 'slacks' on the mike 'exhorting' crowds with that kind of accent you only ever hear on local radio. It's as cringe-making as attending corporate 'gee-ups' or 'kick-offs' or 'team-building' events with a company. That same, utterly flared, over-hyped and pumped pile of passionless shite you used to go to football to avoid.

Because football - as a fan at least - was about passion, local feeling, identity, and fire in your belly.

I watched a game at my local park the other day. Sunday morning stuff. The football was shite, yes. (But have a look at what is served up for your big tickets these days (Birmingham v Stoke anyone? - empty seats everywhere in a so-called 'traditional' football city in what was supposed to be a local derby) but it was the essence of what some of us once loved. Grass, sky, boots, goals, and everything kept simple. Bit of swearing, the occasional fisticuffs, some searing, off-the-cuff humour.

Not the anodyne, anaesthetised, utterly truly plastic shit the experience is today. I've been going nearly thirty years now. And wouldn't give you a tuppenny toss for what football has become these days for the average fan. It could have all been done better. But of course it wouldn't be. Moneymen and business types don't hover too much over issues such as tradition or the word 'fan'. Spivs and marketeers are spivs and marketeers in whatever trade they're in.

It's become an onanist's sport. A pile of shit. Where maniacs with microphones and PA systems that could disturb the peace on the moon, mental defectives in day-glo orange think they understand crowd dynamics or even human beings, players wear hair bands and male grooming products and writhe around like new-born foals who've trod on a piece of glass, and goal 'celebrations' for the retarded.

As far as I'm concerned, it needs to be folded up and fired straight out of General B's spunk cannon into outer space.

You can poke it.

*cue 'dinosaur' jibes and the hamper-bringer brigade's opprobrium*

+Everything. Post of the Year and sums up perfectly the way I feel at the moment.

[Tony Le Mesmer]

In my opinion, none of it is a surprise really, is it? As Foch says, we have the look of a club that is everything that is wrong about modern football today. As soon as Justice Taylor decided to go all-seat, as soon as the old 'big five' got their wishes granted with the formation of the Premiership, as soon as Murdoch and his rapacious pay-tv execs saw a market open up for them, any pretence that a once solid and quite beautiful (I don't care that is was sometime violent or dirty or unpleasant - it was simply FUN) sport would survive as anything less than a Disney-fied and over-exaggerated pantomime of what it once was, was gone.

Going to games now is similar to going to a school fete, or some 'on ice' spectacular with fat provincials in cheap suits or 'slacks' on the mike 'exhorting' crowds with that kind of accent you only ever hear on local radio. It's as cringe-making as attending corporate 'gee-ups' or 'kick-offs' or 'team-building' events with a company. That same, utterly flared, over-hyped and pumped pile of passionless shite you used to go to football to avoid.

Because football - as a fan at least - was about passion, local feeling, identity, and fire in your belly.

I watched a game at my local park the other day. Sunday morning stuff. The football was shite, yes. (But have a look at what is served up for your big tickets these days (Birmingham v Stoke anyone? - empty seats everywhere in a so-called 'traditional' football city in what was supposed to be a local derby) but it was the essence of what some of us once loved. Grass, sky, boots, goals, and everything kept simple. Bit of swearing, the occasional fisticuffs, some searing, off-the-cuff humour.

Not the anodyne, anaesthetised, utterly truly plastic shit the experience is today. I've been going nearly thirty years now. And wouldn't give you a tuppenny toss for what football has become these days for the average fan. It could have all been done better. But of course it wouldn't be. Moneymen and business types don't hover too much over issues such as tradition or the word 'fan'. Spivs and marketeers are spivs and marketeers in whatever trade they're in.

It's become an onanist's sport. A pile of shit. Where maniacs with microphones and PA systems that could disturb the peace on the moon, mental defectives in day-glo orange think they understand crowd dynamics or even human beings, players wear hair bands and male grooming products and writhe around like new-born foals who've trod on a piece of glass, and goal 'celebrations' for the retarded.

As far as I'm concerned, it needs to be folded up and fired straight out of General B's spunk cannon into outer space.

You can poke it.

*cue 'dinosaur' jibes and the hamper-bringer brigade's opprobrium*

+Everything. Post of the Year and sums up perfectly the way I feel at the moment.

You've just put everything about how i feel about going to watch Reading into words Mr Herring. (You Spaccing Mong).

[winchester_royal]

*YAWN*

[Sarah Star]

Move to South America?

I paid a fair bit more than three pence earlier this month when, back in England for August, I took my Brazilian girlfriend to games at West Ham and Tottenham.

But the point remains. Going to a football match is an excellent activity for visitors, not least because appreciation of the event does not require language skills. She doesn't speak much English (though she can now chant 'Who are you?) but can still enjoy the occasion for itself and also make comparisons with the experience back in Rio.

Many things made an impression on her - the patience of the fans, for example, their perpetual encouragement and reluctance to turn against their own team after a misplaced pass.

But it was the organisational aspects that struck her most - modern, clean, compact stadiums with the fans close to the pitch, numbered seating where the numbering is respected, toilets in excellent condition. All these things combined to create an environment that, unlike Brazil, she found safe and welcoming.

I explained how this is a relatively new development, how a traditional culture of football watching was rapidly replaced following the trauma of Hillsbrough and Bradford and the entry of new money.

There are, of course, dangers in all these changes. Contemporary English football needs its critics, pricking its hype bubble, bemoaning its commercialisation and fearing that excessive prices are excluding the future generation of players and thus jeopardising the soul of the game.

But English football is clearly doing something right. The matches we saw were pre-season friendlies - both with crowds considerably higher than the average in the Brazilian First Division. And the most extraordinary thing is the depth of this popularity.

The same is true of the Championship (for foreign readers, the name used in England to refer to the Second Division) - all Saturday's games attracted crowds over 10,000, with only three below the Brazilian top-flight average of 15,000.

It is powerful evidence for the view that the new money has been attracted in large part because the old culture is so well-entrenched.

I tend to see this in connection with the country's industrial past. In its mass form, British football was the creation of the world's first industrial society, with its sense of community and its labour intensive emphasis on physical strength and reliability.

The domestic game's crisis years were those of the crisis of industrial society and now, in a time of uncertainty and bewildering technological change, football offers an opportunity to get back in contact with the collective values of the industrial age - in this new, safe and sanitized manner which so impressed my girlfriend.

Back in her homeland, a different dynamic is in effect and Sports Minister Orlando Silva is aware that the local game has fallen a long way behind.

"Brazilian football could be better and stronger," he said earlier this month. "There is no pre-occupation in having safe and comfortable stadiums to increase the crowds, or altering the kick-off times to get more people into the stadiums. The problem is that in Brazil the principal source of income is selling players."

The other major source is TV rights, which he touched on obliquely in his complaint about the kick off times - the powerful TV Globo ensures that the big evening matches get underway around 10 at night, after the main soap opera.

This leaves South American football with an awkward question. In a model of administration where, compared with player sales and TV rights, the money paid by the fan at the gate is relatively unimportant, why bother investing in supporter comfort?



http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/timvickery/2 ... ery_2.html

[Wimb]

My thoughts are depressingly +1to most of this thread and especially to Herring. Last night I probably spent more time talking to my dad about whether Martin Booty was that bad, or did Micky Adams ever pay a million for Paul Brooker then I did watching the game. It was just that easy to tune out of what was on the pitch.

Yet for some reason I'll go back for more and more and I'll go to Barnsley on Saturday too. Perhaps it's because I've been at university for 4 of the past 5 years and haven't sat through quite as much dross as some or maybe its blind faith.

Football just hasn't been the same the Sky money went through the roof, creating the idea of the PL as being the be all and end all. Im almost gutted in a way that we reached the Premiership and survived as what does our club have to aim for? Even if we'd gone up and then straight back down, we could be aiming to prove we can survive, but now what do we have to look forward too?

In a wierd way perhaps this is why I'm so in favour of going with the kids, because it's something different, something I've not really seen in 15 years of watching the team. There's something oddly noble (if not naive) about hoping a group who have been with the club for 5 or 6 years growing up, can now give it their all for the first team. Maybe it's because right now I don't know if Davies is a money grabbing prima donna etc that I can back them to the hilt. The likes of Kitson, Shorey and Hunt have soured me because I see players taking basically sidestepps for cash, or for a chance to battle relegation.

Meh it's all a bit shite at the moment, it could be FAR WORSE and I've seen worse but it just feels flat right now. Maybe I'll go watch Basingstoke on days I can't see the Royals now and then. I know that watching Lancaster when they were in the Blue Square North was brilliant and I knew that coming to support the team mattered. Do I get even the slightest bit of that vibe at the Mad Stad... No. Maybe away from home, but not at home games.

All in all, it's a bit pants, except for the pizza pods which actually taste rather good.

Oh and Fochers Young Ones reference ftw.

[Ark Royal]

Living across the pond since 2002 I have now got over my initial pangs of absence from the club that haunted me for a few years. People have alluded to the 'Disney-fication' of the game as a whole and some of the pre-match rituals that I have witnessed at games at the Madstad have made my skin crawl. I feel like we are all part of the of some corporate weekend piss-up full of fat white-collared pcunts eating from canape-filled troughs. It is as if the game on its own is just not good enough. It was definitely not always thus and is the worse for it.

The sense of 'belonging' to a club has therefore been long gone for me. oxf*rd, even in the darkest despair of 97/98, when not only were we probably the worst Reading team ever and we were losing Elm Park, I still carried a torch for the club and felt a tangible connection with fellow Tilehurst Enders that has not come close to being created at the Madstad. The community in football is gone and has been replaced by some glaring, blingy, sensationalist, Redknapp-trousered, Stellingesque product that is just......oxf*rd shit. The despair that I feel about the modern game literally keeps me awake at night.

I have had to take steps to try and regain what I once had and I have found it in coaching kids. The honesty and purity of it beats any shit that is currently served up at the Madstad. It also makes me feel the way I used to feel about the game - the thrill, the energy, the frustration and the joy. Standing on the touchline, it makes my heart pound just like it did at Elm Park in the '60s when football was, for a nine-year-old, a magical and deeply affecting experience, which has seared memories in me that will never die. I would swap the look on my girls' faces when they score a goal or win a game for any Reading team handing out a 5-0 thrashing any day of the week.

Call me a cynical old git, but the game was a passion for me. Note the use of the word 'was'. Now I have got to the point where a lot of the time I could not give a oxf*rd about the Reading result, the English teams in Europe or the England team itself. I feel that the game has let me down and I never, ever thought that I would hear myself say those words.

[Gordons Cumming]

Ark Royal

You've just made me cry.................

[Dorset-Knob]

Bravo messrs Herring and Ark Royal, (I'm sure there are others I've missed too, sorry) but your recent posts were, all at the same time, funny sad, accurate, thoughtful and full of resonance.

I too am now pleased to be more involved with my 11 year old son's football career and it is head and shoulders above the 'hypeshyte' we've come to know. Spoilt only, sometimes, by the mimicing of the histrionics we see from the professionals.

The Enforced absence and withdrawal symptoms were difficult at first, but occasional visits served to confirm that the football was only a thin filling in a grossly bizarre, turgid, bullshit sandwich. Perspective is a much clearer view and the heart head conflict is far easier to rationalise from afar

I guess nostalgia ain't what it used to be!

ps I think, "Love football, hate hypeshyte" sounds like a tee-shirt I might wear

[Focher]

nice post ark royal, although i will add your name sake, 50035, has now been painted into Load haul livery and has been re numbered 50135. I fuking disgrace if you ask me.

[Sir Rodney Effing]

nice post ark royal, although i will add your name sake, 50035, has now been painted into Load haul livery and has been re numbered 50135. I fuking disgrace if you ask me.

I thought you said you couldnt be bothered any more yesterday!!!

now I await all the pointless and crap abuse... no point, my boss is watch so Im logging off

[Focher]

nice post ark royal, although i will add your name sake, 50035, has now been painted into Load haul livery and has been re numbered 50135. I fuking disgrace if you ask me.

I thought you said you couldnt be bothered any more yesterday!!!

now I await all the pointless and crap abuse... no point, my boss is watch so Im logging off

no i cant be bothered, which is why im now posting about Windsor & Eton and Class 50 diesel locomotives.

[Dorset-Knob]

oooh the class 50 diesel, must rush to the bathroom, aaaaargh too late

[General B]

You must hide everytime i come close to emptying my glass, it's got far more attractions than the firm, the bloke from the bill that mans the freebie entrance gate, Paul Merton in his duffel coat and a genuine midget in a beaver outfit.

The fact that I have only ever been once might be the reason you don't often see me there. Which bloke from the Bill is it?

[Vision]

If its not Reg Hollis I'll eat my jester hat.

[Focher]

i thought it was Tosh Lines

[Dorset-Knob]

i thought it was Tosh Lines

there might be a technical difficulty, what with him being dead and all

[FiNeRaIn]

Why don't we all support proper football, like US College football. Played in front of 90,000, f ck all money involved and no crowd violance.

Whose up for michigan away on a tuesday night boys?