This is a brand new football blog from Dublin, Ireland. And it starts with an acknowledgement of the inspiration for the title…
Of course it was Brian Clough who inspired the Sultans of Ping in the first place, with his description of Forest winger John Robertson, but moving on…
I’m a town planner by day, a job, like any other, that gets in the way of watching and reading about football. In these posts, I’m going to try to get across the love of the game that so many of us feel but that rarely gets a look-in in the mainstream media anymore. Football is so damn cynical these days. And when it’s not being cynical it’s overly and insincerely sentimental. Football coverage is generally atrocious. For every Ken Early and Graham Hunter, there’s 50 tabloid hacks sucking the life out of the game. Scandal after scandal is manufactured by these people. Grealish drunk; McClean ravaged for his admirable stance on the poppy; Raheem havin’ the “crack”. All bullshit. All irrelevant to the game. It’s January now and we are being bombarded by outright lies on an hourly basis, known as the transfer window. Stories are created; the hopes of the gullible fans raised and dashed every day; and behind it all Rupert Murdoch is laughing, and an elite band of billionaires with him. Football is a dirty little business.
But we love it. We love it because it’s the single most unpredictable thing in our lives. We love it because a combination of Shane Long’s right foot and Jonathan Walters’ arse can topple the world champions; because Exeter City could and should have beaten Liverpool last week; because Leicester City topped the Premier League at Christmas 12 months after being bottom; because Iceland and Albania will be in France in June, and the Dutch won’t; because every so often, just when you’re getting tired of the whole damn pantomime, something happens that pulls you back in and starts you dreaming again. Liverpool in Istanbul. United in Barcelona in ’99. A scoreboard during a competitive European fixture in White Hart Lane that read – for a glorious short-lived few minutes – Tottenham Hotspur 0 – 1 Shamrock Rovers. Damn that shaky cameraphone but I know what it said.
But mainly we love it because we still believe we can do what they do – those overpaid lucky bastards. Every mistake made by a player is cursed to high heaven because you know exactly what he should have done and you know you have the ability to do it. Clear the f***ing thing, don’t pass it out of defence! Play it outside, don’t dribble in!! And as a former fairly useful dead-ball expert meself, I know for a fact that I can knock in a better corner than 90% of those taken in the Champions League. And I can’t for the life of me understand a free-kick ballooning way over the bar! Clowns!! All of this despite the fact that I never climbed the football ladder beyond the low reaches of the Dublin District Schoolboy League. And neither, most likely, did you.
We love it because football is everything. It can range from drama to comedy to farce and to tragedy in 90 minutes. In 5 minutes.
So why start writing this? Well it’s probably a combination of things, but mainly ego, if I’m to be honest. I want to share my views and the internet lets me.
But also because 2015 was a year where, despite (or maybe because of) not seeing as much football on TV as perhaps in the past, it once again began to occupy the same part of my brain as it did when I was 12. Football excited me again. I walked out of Lansdowne Road after that German match with the same mix of a permanent smile and tears behind the eyes as I had in 1990 after the Dutch game. It wasn’t a game of football. It was a country arriving at, or returning to, it’s proper place in the footballl world. It was also a country falling back in love with their Boys in Green. For the first time in a long, long time, the Irish soccer team contained bona fide national heroes. For all the hype over the Rugby team going into their World Cup as back-to-back 6 Nations champions, much of it merited, and for all the column inches devoted to GAA and another Dublin All-Ireland victory, and then to Conor McGregor, for a huge number of us 2015 will always be remembered as the year we beat the World Champions in football and qualified for our third European Championships.
I hope over the coming months and years to get that across; to counter some of the pointless nonsense that envelops the beautiful game these days and to focus on the great things about it, the worthwhile over the sensationalist. And to make you laugh a bit along the way too. It won’t be very regular, but keep an eye out for it…
Thanks for reading
Clemo (3)
A Yard of Grass 