Current music:

Experimental Aircraft - Symphony

World Of Sport
You know I'm getting burned out when I start watching sports again.

They screen them in the pub, and I've found myself watching them when I should be working. It is very sad.

I missed the rematch between Arsenal and Dynamo Kiev, but I caught the first game and I'm amazed Arsenal won the second leg. Arsenal were playing terribly well-bred European football, delicately stroking the ball across the pitch from player to politely waiting player. At which point three Russian mutants would appear with turf in their teeth, break the Arsenal players' legs and punt the ball down the pitch at two hundred miles an hour. You could see the genuine confusion in the Arsenal boys' faces: "We are blow-dried multimillionaires who shag pop-star-lookalike groupies and have mock-Tudor mansions in the Home Counties. Why are these people, who probably live in tin houses and get their water from wells, being so nasty to us?"

It's a sort of football we seemed to stop playing in the 90s, the Kiev game. We used to call it "kick and rush," and when Watford played it in the 80s it destroyed the clever-clever "total football" that had held since the 70s. It was really simple. Watford didn't muck around with that careful balletic football skills shit. One bloke would kick the ball into the other side's half and nine half-bright ex-bricklayers would run after it, treading on anything and anyone in their way. It revolutionised the game by denying that there was any kind of cleverness in winning a football match. And, if you were facing nine bloodcrazed mongoloids in pus-yellow jerseys running at you like stabbed bulls just because you had the ball, you tended to agree. This was adapted by Wimbledon's "Crazy Gang" into a game plan that had bugger all to do with getting the ball and everything to do with mutilating the opposition so badly that they were literally physically unable to kick the ball. There's a famous photo of Wimbledon's Vinnie Jones, ostensibly shadowing his opposite half Paul Gascoigne -- reaching behind him and surreptitiously crushing Gascoigne's testicles in his fist. Gascoigne is a drunk now, playing right-barstool for Dago Rovers or something. Vinnie Jones is a film star. There's your lesson right there.

This was in stark contrast to England playing rugby against Uruguay, a game that would have been discontinued in the first ten minutes if it'd been a boxing match. The final score was something like 110 to 9. By the end of the first half the England players were doing everything but sinking their teeth into Uruguayan's throats and shaking them around like wolves with a rabbit in their jaws. It was horrible. By thirty minutes in, Englishmen were literally strolling to the other side and scoring, broken Uruguayans staggering and collapsing in their wake. At the end of the game, the English went around congratulating them on a game well played, but the Uruguayans were all so concussed by that point that they clearly didn't know where they were or why these wild-eyed freaks in white were groping them.

Sports are crap, they really are.

(Written in 2003 and dusted off tonight because I'm in the middle of something else and can't spare the brainjuice)