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The beautiful game
is now in the last
minutes of extra time
Kenneth Roy
Wednesday morning
In Scotland it is dominated by two warring tribes of no great skill, who slug it out for a meaningless crown with the other teams nowhere in sight. What’s beautiful about that?
Alex Salmond, on the same BBC Breakfast News, called football ‘the beautiful game’ and said that we should not allow it to be ‘besmirched’ by the threat to the lives of three innocent people. In such impromptu situations, the first minister is seldom guilty of reaching for the ill-judged phrase, but he managed to strumble on one this morning. Mr Salmond should seriously ask himself what is beautiful about this game.
In Scotland it is dominated by two warring tribes of no great skill, who slug it out for a meaningless crown with the other teams nowhere in sight. What’s beautiful about that? There is no competition, there is precious little ability, and there is a mountain of debt with the Inland Revenue clamouring at the door. What’s beautiful about that?
Scottish football – perhaps football in general; I wouldn’t know – thrives on macho posturing which starts in the sports pages of the newspapers. In these journalistic ghettos, the aggression of the streets is scooped up and recycled. So on the back page of today’s Daily Record we have ‘The Battle for Ibrox’ juxtaposed with the story of a manager ‘raging at cock-ups’ and, inside, CALL THE COPS – not, as you might expect, an account of the police’s interest in lethal packages but the headline over a routine match report. There is a seedy emphasis on money and ‘deals’ in many of the stories, while the photographs depict scenes of angry confrontation on the field.
The message could not be clearer: this is war. It is, however, a war being fought by the tabloids (and some of the broadsheets too) in a curious lost Scotland in which bad boys are ‘caned’ – although only rugby-playing public schoolboys were ever caned north of the border – and managers are inevitably ‘gaffers’, a word evoking the dear dead days of the Greenock shipyards. It is hard to say which is worse – the violent imagery of the headlines and pictures or the queasy sentimentality in which they are wrapped up. The same sentimentality which insists that football is ‘the beautiful game’.
The newspapers are not to blame for the letter bombs. Nor are the players and officials who behave so badly. But all of them contribute to the ghastly atmosphere. Already, the melodramatic intervention of the chief constable of Strathclyde, after trouble on and off the field at a recent Old Firm game, seems to have been counter-productive. Mr Salmond says the beautiful game should not be ‘besmirched’ by what has happened. Does he not realise that it was besmirched long ago; and that football is already in the last minutes of extra time?
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
