A game for professionals watched by amateurs

Bes honest, you're just fed up with this

AS SOMEBODY hooked on football since my Grandad bought me an Arsenal shirt when I was four, the World Cup is always a mixed bag for me. There are great memories, of course – collecting Panini stickers for the Mexico 1986 album that I still own. Getting told off for swearing at the telly – or more accurately at Chris Waddle – in 1990. Watching Arsenal win the World Cup in 1998.

But as most die-hard football fans will tell you, there are things about the World Cup that are frankly annoying. This time has been no different, but the South African venue has resulted in some new strains of World Cup annoyance. So here are my top five world cup gripes.

1. The tournament is in Africa. Don’t complain if the noise in the grounds spoils your tea party while you’re watching it in Hampstead. Go and watch a polo match instead if you want to chortle with your posh friends in a quiet environment and eat prawn sandwiches.

2. I can’t stand the liberal hand-wringing and fake despair that voices itself in comments like “why are they spending all this money on football – they have soooo many other things they should be concentrating on.”

Yes, South Africa does have massive problems – housing, HIV, corruption, law and order. And yes, anyone who said about the world cup opening that it was “as important as the day Nelson Mandela was released” probably needs a lesson in historical perspective. But this argument soon begins to unfold as a typically overbearing piece of accepted wisdom from the liberal intelligentsia.

Do the naysayers think that South Africa should spend no money on sport and culture – or is it just that they think football is all a bit hoi polloi for public money to be spent on it? Far better to put something on that the vast majority of South Africans could not care less about.

Have these people not seen countless South Africans – including many who don’t appear to have the luxury of choosing between organic muesli and free-range poached egg for breakkie – emphatically say that yes, they want the World Cup, despite the problems that their country faces? They’re probably loving the World Cup so much partly because of the contrast to the bleak reality of those very problems, and who can blame them?

So, what we have here then is yet another example of a ‘the poor don’t know what’s best for them’ argument. Sigh.

3. World Cup clip shows and news specials make me want to scream. Annoying celebs who know nothing about football desperately grasping for some reflected glory or exposure, much like a blood-sucking parasite clinging to an elephant. Why on earth would anyone want to know the views of a second-rate comedian or former big brother contender when they have absolutely nothing of value to say?

The hysterical newspaper reporting of the World Cup is also a source of great puzzlement. These people really need to find a happy medium in their lives and stop massively overreacting to everything. On one match the quality and future prospects of a team cannot be judged.

Our media also need to find a perspective on events that isn’t ridiculously England-centric to the exclusion of all else. One paper ran a “top ten world cup moments” piece the other week. Nine of the events directly involved England. That’s just ridiculously blinkered. And I say that as someone wholeheartedly supporting the three lions, by the way. My advice is to stick to watching the matches and leave the froth well and truly to one side.

4. We’re a few days and one whole England game into the World Cup. Cue the tedious and inevitable “foreigners destroying our game” rubbish. After the character assassinations of the goalkeeper, let’s revert to type and blame Johnny foreigner. After all, England won almost every World Cup until the arrival of foreign players in the 1990s. Oh, hang on a minute, that’s totally untrue. What the heck, why let the facts get in the way of a good witch hunt?

5. Annoying relatives and acquaintances are a great World Cup trial. You know the scene – people who know nothing about the game who, by some unfortunate coincidence, happen to be in the same place as you when it all becomes a bit tense. They’ve read the papers and think they’re an expert.

I once made a person who I’d given a lift to the pub walk home after they argued with me that the ref was right to send off Beckham against Argentina. It wasn’t the point they made that annoyed me. It was the annoyingly persistent, emphatic and unapologetic way they made it, oblivious to their complete and utter lack of knowledge about the game of football beyond what they’d read in a few colour supplements.

So, perhaps the World Cup is to football what the Wimbledon Championships are to tennis. A great spectacle if you put to one side the hangers-on and nonsense that surrounds it all, and focus on the core of the matter. I’ll try to lighten up and do just that… until the next penalty shoot-out.