where two eleven person committees,
a referee and two linesmen,
each form agendas for the control of a ball,
and to compete with each other.
To entertain themselves first,
their audience second.
Football is where young men first taste
being picked for a committee,
and learn to disguise being led unwillingly.
In my school team I was always the last
to be picked, for being unfit at fitting in.
Forty years on I now see what I was blind to.
I never saw the fun in entertainment,
I felt more for the ball than the teamwork.
Football WAS a game - now it's a Sport. Hence the committees...
ReplyDeleteYou are quite right. The process of football going from being an uncompetitive, apolitical, rule-light, genuinely free-for-all into a competitive sport happened long before either of us was born. But the label of 'game' persists with it in the way it is sold to the young by older people, who will sell the idea of competition as if it were an illicit drug.
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