“I Could Do Better Than That”
This (updated) post was first published in January 2013 on the Robbledegook blog.
Besides my familiarity with the period in which Death Is a Laff Riot is set, there are myriad reasons for placing my tale in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Among them is that while footballers then were certainly athletes, you always got the sense watching them that, at the lower levels of the game anyway, they were a bit more like you and me, physically speaking. That sense of watching them play and thinking “I could do better than that” is important to me as I spin my yarn, because I want my team of part-timers and semi-pros to be within reach of our imaginations enough that those of us who play or played the game might recognize ourselves just a little among my fictitious lot. The footballing characters in my story are potential heroes, inevitable scapegoats and overwhelmingly human, no different from real footballers, just hopefully a little more like you and me than the modern iteration of professional sportsman.
The Guardian’s Barney Ronay has written a super piece that points up how times have definitively ch-ch-changed when it comes to the modern footballing professional and neatly ties together his thoughts on David Bowie and Fernando Torres with the overarching theme that no, “not everyone gets to be Bowie” and no, you cannot do better than the modern footballer — these days well-machined super-athletes who, even in decline, are miles better than you or I could ever dream of being. “I could do better than that?” Uh, well, no:
I’m looking forward as I write Death Is a Laff Riot to reminding the world of the lanky, the gangly, the beefy, the spidery and the other heterogeneous, awkward, human traits of players on my pretend team from a bygone era. And while I am awestruck at the modern footballer’s athletic gifts, I can’t help wishing the game might not have progressed so far so fast. I love watching the modern game and its artist-athletes (I appreciate that Ronay calls today’s game a “form of high-stakes physical ballet” — that is exactly how I saw the game back when I watched top flight players 30 years ago). But in the rapid modernization of the game — especially as business interests have overtaken (in my view) the natural evolution of the sport and turned footballers into beings colder and more distant from your everyday Everymen — something elemental has been lost.
I hate the English Premier League for super-monetizing the sport, for dividing itself from the Football League, for calling itself “Premier” for goodness sake. I lived in Scotland in the late ’70s and was struck by how stupid and inappropriate the moniker “Premier” sounded then — for the Scottish top division, ya ken? At that time, the English had it right, naming the succession of levels of achievement from the top down: Divisions One, Two, Three and Four. A logical sequence and not this idiocy of “branded” naming: the fourth tier of the sport is called “League Two.” The old Second Division? “The Championship.” Get real.
I may be a Luddite whose memory of the supposed good old days is clouded by misplaced nostalgia and a fondness for three o’clock Saturday kick-offs across every league and division in the country. I know it is unrealistic to expect football in a commercialized world to reconsider itself to the point that it reverts to what was, admittedly, a past as dingy and dangerous (at times) as it was dignified. I don’t care.
The thing I’ve got going for me is that I can write a version of the past that breathes life into that lost world of three o’clock kick-offs, 50 pence schoolboy entries and standing on disintegrating, uncovered terraces beside crotchety old geezers who spent the entire game yelling epithets at mud-caked (mostly) above-average footballers. Sports specimens akin to rotary-dial telephones or three-wheeled cars. I want to be sure I capture that world faithfully enough that the storytelling brings back all sorts of memories and evokes a time when maybe, on a good day, you really could “do better than that.”
Besides my familiarity with the period in which Death Is a Laff Riot is set, there are myriad reasons for placing my tale in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Among them is that while footballers then were certainly athletes, you always got the sense watching them that, at the lower levels of the game anyway, they were a bit more like you and me, physically speaking. That sense of watching them play and thinking “I could do better than that” is important to me as I spin my yarn, because I want my team of part-timers and semi-pros to be within reach of our imaginations enough that those of us who play or played the game might recognize ourselves just a little among my fictitious lot. The footballing characters in my story are potential heroes, inevitable scapegoats and overwhelmingly human, no different from real footballers, just hopefully a little more like you and me than the modern iteration of professional sportsman.
The Guardian’s Barney Ronay has written a super piece that points up how times have definitively ch-ch-changed when it comes to the modern footballing professional and neatly ties together his thoughts on David Bowie and Fernando Torres with the overarching theme that no, “not everyone gets to be Bowie” and no, you cannot do better than the modern footballer — these days well-machined super-athletes who, even in decline, are miles better than you or I could ever dream of being. “I could do better than that?” Uh, well, no:
“You probably think you could do better, but you couldn’t.
“In fact one of the remaining measures of distance between our relentlessly over-exposed elite footballers and those who pay to watch them is the enduring and unbridgeable gulf in basic physicality. This is particularly the case with footballers of the last 10 years, who have generally coalesced into a single highly specialised ideal of unattainable athleticism.
“Obvious exceptions aside, footballers are no longer lanky, gangly, beefy, spidery and so on. They are instead almost uniformly lithe and Olympian, their bodies remorselessly optimum-scaled, narrower, stringier, more compact.”
Click Here to Get Your Copy of Death Is a Laff Riot
I hate the English Premier League for super-monetizing the sport, for dividing itself from the Football League, for calling itself “Premier” for goodness sake. I lived in Scotland in the late ’70s and was struck by how stupid and inappropriate the moniker “Premier” sounded then — for the Scottish top division, ya ken? At that time, the English had it right, naming the succession of levels of achievement from the top down: Divisions One, Two, Three and Four. A logical sequence and not this idiocy of “branded” naming: the fourth tier of the sport is called “League Two.” The old Second Division? “The Championship.” Get real.
I may be a Luddite whose memory of the supposed good old days is clouded by misplaced nostalgia and a fondness for three o’clock Saturday kick-offs across every league and division in the country. I know it is unrealistic to expect football in a commercialized world to reconsider itself to the point that it reverts to what was, admittedly, a past as dingy and dangerous (at times) as it was dignified. I don’t care.
The thing I’ve got going for me is that I can write a version of the past that breathes life into that lost world of three o’clock kick-offs, 50 pence schoolboy entries and standing on disintegrating, uncovered terraces beside crotchety old geezers who spent the entire game yelling epithets at mud-caked (mostly) above-average footballers. Sports specimens akin to rotary-dial telephones or three-wheeled cars. I want to be sure I capture that world faithfully enough that the storytelling brings back all sorts of memories and evokes a time when maybe, on a good day, you really could “do better than that.”