On the fickleness of sporting alliegances

“There is nothing original in the reflection that football has a frightening capacity to make shocking hypocrites of us all.”

So writes Matthew Norman, apropos the recent changing circumstances of a player who at one point was on the verge of being fired and shamed for refusing to play, and is now regarded as a great guy for his recent performances.

What all this tells us is that sports fans, like others who have a tribal loyalty to an institution, can convince themselves of contradictory views with ease. On the positive side, if sport allows people to channel their atavistic urges in a vaguely harmless way, all well and good. Alas, the absurdities of the situation do become quite irritating particularly in cases where a sportsman is a villain one minute for allegedly saying or doing something nasty, and is treated as a god the next for being able to, say, kick a ball accurately over 50 yards.

George Orwell, by the way, was very harsh on team sports, particularly when national alliegances were involved, but the same on a smaller scale applies to clubs within the same nation. Here is a quote:

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only
the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield.

Set against all this, it has to be said that it is heartening to see what appears to be mostly genuine sympathy for a Bolton footballer who had a heart attack during a match a few days’ ago. He’s very lucky to be alive. I do wonder if one problem with football these days is that in the English Premiership particularly, it is played at a helter-skelter pace. If you look at a match of, say, 40 years ago when the likes of George Best or Jimmy Greaves were strutting their stuff, the game seemed to be a bit slower. Just a thought.