The Trouble With Arsenal is That They Always Try to Just walk It In

I'd say that Chris O'Dowd* is my spirit animal, but I'm A) probably too old to get away with saying things like that and B) fairly certain that's the plot of Moone Boy

Some of the more culturally astute of you will have noticed that the World Cup's on. For those of you not in the know, this is a associated football competition contested by various nationalities including, but by no means limited to, the French. The last team standing at the end of the tournament is presented a golden ice cream truck by Dame Helen Mirren and given a lovely sloppy kiss and a high five. All the other teams have to call the winners 'Sir' and make them sandwiches for a year, at which point we go through the whole shebang again. This year the tournament's being held in Brazil who are celebrating the universal appeal and uniting power of the game by flattening poor communities and shooting protesters in the face.

Despite what the above inanity may suggest, I am actually quite fond of the World Cup. I like the spectacle, the sense of occasion and the little men running around and kicking balls. I even like the fact that something about Phil Neville's commentary on the BBC puts me in mind of a robot struggling to process the concept of love. You could argue that the Premier League provides the same sort of thing, but closer to home. But there are those of us out there who support solid, but not particularly glamorous teams like Middlesbrough who aren't in the premiership and so it's nice to have an international tournament every couple of years, even if it's awarded by a governing body as irredeemably corrupt as FIFA. 

What I've never been particularly boshed with is the whole three lions shite that often rears its head around this time. Don't get me wrong, I like England. I keep most my stuff there, the weather's unlikely to kill you and bacon sandwiches are plentiful and easy to come by. But nothing can persuade me to view twenty two men kicking a ball around as anything more than an entertaining distraction, as opposed to a re-staging of the battle of Agincourt, our hopes, dreams and aspirations hanging on the result. There's nowt wrong with a bit of enthusiasm, of course, but we seem to expect what is, at the end of the day, a game to somehow embody the nation, which ends up being just a teensy bit reductive as you've effectively condensed an entire national history to what the lizard brain of a terminally drunk football fan can still remember around around the eight pint mark. You can see why the Scots get arsey.  

Thankfully, mainly due to the national team being a bit on the green side this time round, expectations are much lower than normal this year and the resulting coverage has bordered on the sane. The Sun newspaper has made a token effort though, sending out a free advertisement newspaper, headlined 'This Is Our England' with a Sgt Peppers type collage of what it presumably believes are pre-eminent examples of English greatness. This is the kind of thing the paper always does, taking broadly popular cultural reference points and appropriating them, as if it itself was in some way responsible for Only Fools and Horses and The Beatles. Depressingly noteworthy was the sheer ball shrivelling banality of most of the choices. There are, let me be clear, many reasons I love England and am grateful that I was born here. James Corden and Simon Cowell are not amongst them. 

I was also interested to read about the brief shitstorm that hit Ed Miliband when the daft tit agreed to pose for a deeply unflattering photo holding the aforementioned shite rag, thereby offending the entirety of Merseyside (incidentally, when did we become okay with our senior politicians shilling for private companies in order to help them shift product?).  It generally seems to be accepted that the Labour leader's dropped a bit of a bollock over the issue, which I tend to agree with, but surely he's not the one who's come out looking the worst out of all this, given that it's prompted discussion of why this was considered such a faux pas in the first place. It's reminded people that The Sun, a paper that presumes to speak for the English working class, saw fit to slander Liverpool fans (the majority of whom are, erm, English and working class) in the most vicious manner possible  in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster, only offering an almost apology decades later. Amazingly, following Miliband's apology, this morning's editorial (The link leads to another blog discussing the issue. The paper itself exists behind a pay wall) managed over a 100 words of self righteous outrage without once even hinting at why so many in one of Britain's most important cities wont even wipe their arse with the paper, instead framing the controversy as the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition suffering some sort of patriotism cringe. 

So remember: overly enthusiastic, ever so slightly forced love of football is good and natural and proper. Actually giving a shit about the lives of football fans and their families is very, very bad and evidence you hate this country and should probably fuck off to Russia. 

Sod it, I'm off to watch the second half of France v Honduras and have a pie. Here's another character sketch from that thing what I writes.

This one has a moustache.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*Yes, that's meant to be Chris O'Dowd on the left. Shut up.