There Are Too Many Thickos In Football
Created | Updated May 19, 2004
Rt. Hon. Francis MAUDE MP
House of Commons
Westminster
London SW1A 0AA
Maude,
Own Goal
The eloquence of your remark that 'there are too many
thickos in English football' has caught my attention.
Football without fans is nothing
- Jock Stein
I can report from my experiences on the terraces that football
is indeed teeming rife with the most disarmingly discourteous
yahoos imaginable. I have rarely heard such a hullabaloo as that
vented by the congregated masses at the overseeing official each
and every time the unfortunate man is obliged to issue some
cautionary words or punishment to one of the players for having
committed an indiscretion. Some might say that it is almost a
hybrid experience born out the ruckus of PM's Question Time and the
(reported) rabid bedlam of a choir-boy in The Garrick, and the
enjoyment of football is all the better for it.
Worrying as it may appear to you in Westminster though,
footballers and their followers are a manifest reflection of the
public at large that constitutes the national population, the
consequent inference of your statement being that there are too
many thickos in England. Thus to assert, as you have, that
footballers are in any way thicker than, say, ice-hockey players
may be contrived, I submit, to be gallopingly slanderous to the
population at large. As a director of the Guildford Flames, you are
no doubt fully acquainted with the academic competence of the
ice-hockey fraternity, and I would be surprised to learn of any
marked contrast between the intellectual performance of both
ice-hockey players and fans and their footballing counterparts. I
suggest you raise this issue at the next board meeting as it
appears to trouble you.
Behind every kick of the ball there has to be a
thought
- Dennis Bergkamp
Conversely, however, and contrary to the apparent gist of your
jibe, there are huge number of high-brow intellectuals at large in
sport, and specifically in football, there being a school of study
devoted to the sage and the sapient. 'Philosophy Football' is an
excellent book devoted to the laudation of XI great footballing
thinkers, a veritable dream-team, if you will, of philosophising
fans and players through the ages.
GK Albert Camus
LB Jean Baudrillard
RB Simone de Beauvoir
CB Friedrich Nietzsche
CB Ludwig Wittgenstein
RM Oscar Wilde
CM William Shakespeare
CM Sun Tzu
LM Bob Marley
CF Antonio Gramsci
CF Umberto Eco
Football is an art
- Germaine Greer
Manager Mark Perryman appears to favour 4-4-1-1 with Eco on his
own up front and Gramsci filling in the hole behind - an offensive
approach not dissimilar, I seem to recall, from Peter Taylor's
approach with Heskey and Barmby against Italy recently. I would
prefer to see Wilde on the other wing as I believe he was more of a
left-footer. In this context (the ambi-pedal), silky-skilled Steve
McMannaman has a touch of the Oscar Wildes about him don't you
think?
Power is only too happy to make football bear a
diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses
-
Jean Baudrillard
Dangerously sharp at left-back, enfant terrible, Baudrillard
offers an alternative view, writing that 'after several thousand
revolutions and a century or two of political apprenticeship... there are still... a thousand persons who stand up and
twenty million who remain 'passive' - and not only
passive, but who, in all good faith and without even asking
themselves why, frankly prefer a football match to a human and
political drama'. Thus, society cannot be comprised
solely of heavy-weight intellectuals and leaders of men. The
passive majority to which Baudrillard refers is comprised of
fundamentally simple-hearted yeomen with neither ambition nor
discontent in excess.
[Football] is WAR - minus the shooting
- George Orwell
Entertainment (here football, but otherwise inter alia a
Friday night out to the pub, a 2-week caravan holiday in
Bournemouth, sex) ensures that excessive antisocial desires
(incited perhaps by boredom) are kept at bay that might otherwise
threaten the harmony required by the establishment to maintain the
status quo. Bosman-like, Baudrillard is challenging, exposing and
unravelling the defensive order imposed by the establishment that
you, Maude MP, purport to represent. Football is employed by our
politicians as a device in the quest for national identity, as an
arena 'constructively' manipulated by politicians and
generals, and as an agent of political, socio-economic, and
cultural elites in order to stifle working-class and popular
consciousness and revolt. Baudrillard may have a point - is the
actual contest on the field secondary to the event of going to the
stadium and participating in the hoped-for victory? After all, at
the end of the day, three points in the bag is all that counts.
Football is working class ballet
- Alf
Garnett
The thrust of Baudrillard's argument is that
football's existence in society is semi-symbiotic, necessary
in itself for the sake of society's hegemony providing that
its audience members are predominantly proletarians, whilst
allowing football to feed off the need for such a diversion to
exist. In this way, Baudrillard is arguing that you can't
have 'too many thickos in football'.
Have you noticed how we only win the World Cup under
a Labour Government
- Harold Wilson
Perhaps in this context you have sympathy for the efforts of
John Stuart Mill who wrote splendidly in his seminal essay
Representative Government (1861) in favour of assigning plurality
of suffrage to those with authenticated superiority of education.
You will concede, nonetheless, that however solid at the back such
a philosophy appears prima facie, the ovinely Conservative
people of Horsham may not turn out to be the bookish intelligentsia
that you would require to maintain the 18,000 seat majority that
keeps you in gin and quail at the House of Commons.
Indeed, 18,000 can sound like a comfortable margin in which to
indulge your complacency by articulating fatuous inanities in
search of the instant gratification of the well-received populist
soundbite. However, it will be of little solace to you that 18,000
is less than a third of the capacity of Old Trafford, and is only
marginally less than that of The Valley.
You are advised to remember that your political existence relies
on the grace and goodwill of the general public of whom you are so
dismissive. The thickos at whom you so readily scoff are the
same subjects whose suffrage you will smarmingly and hypocritically
covet at election time, and I hope they kick your smugly pompous
arse right off the park.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Montague Trout
Manager - Organcheese Academicals
