Olympia

Hello. This is my ranting. There will be more of it.

The Winter Olympics are on, and it's a barn-storming performance from our brave British athletes - not dead last, how impressive are we. A silver in the Ladies Downhill Suicide (it's not called a skeleton luge for nothing, you know), and perhaps something for curling. Really, winter sport doesn't really grab me. Most sport doesn't. I love the cricket but that's not really a sport, except when the football isn't on, and that's most days. Actually, it's not even football I have an antipathy to. It's the whole "I LOVE Football!" thing. I'm sure people do, sincerely and with their whole heart, but I don't and being repeatedly told I should is bleeding annoying. It makes me feel a bit like a deviant when I say "I'm not really interested in football, actually". People do indeed raise eyebrows. You don't see that very often in these anything-goes-politcal-correctness-gone-mad times of ours, but people are genuinely surprised.

But what is there to love? Manchester United are the biggest sporting club in the world, but who owns it? An American venture capitalist who put the whole lot on his credit card. Hibs are, it seems, the plaything of a Russian oligarch and the less said about England, the better.No, actually. Let's rant. It is my confident prediction that England will get no further that the third round of the World Cup. Why? We are always so full of hope and excitement, forty years of hurt, if Frank Skinner and David Baddiel get re-released. The papers are full of it - bash the Germans and print a picture of someone with the cross of St George painted on their face, shouting defiantly into the camera. Beckham on big posters, Sven Goran Eriksson interviewed in semi-darkness on film, all of it trying to make it seem as if it matters in any way at all. And then we lose on penalties. Dirty cheating foreigners. Passion, Pride, Belief!

Oh, come on, treat me with some fucking inteligence! We keep losing because we do not have a team, not a proper team, not something that is greater than the sum of its parts, no, just a collection of spoilt, childish multi-millionaire retarded brats who just happen to be able to kick a ball and are wearing the same shirt. We got knocked out of Euro 2004 because Wayne "Bully Beef" Rooney broke his foot, and that's somehow an acceptable excuse. But how come when Simon Jones broke himself during the fourth Test, we could still perform well enough in the fifth to win the Ashes? An integral team member gone, but still enough to win? Sounds like a good team to me. An integral member gone, and then the rest fall apart in the fifteen minutes he's not there? What do you think? Don't try and suggest that we just aren't very good at it, though. Don't suggest that even the game itself isn't as important as the establishment that surrounds it and the only bit we take seriously is football supporting. Hey, tell you what, instead of trying to bring some of these issues back to Earth from the clouds of senseless money they inhabit, let's just blame the manager becasue he's Swedish. Passion, Pride, Belief.

The papers sell us all this, it fills the schedules on Sky and closes down half of the average British city centre every other Saturday. Why should I accept the presence of five hundred policemen in riot boots as normal? The kid I saw on Hinckley Road a couple of weeks ago is a case in point. He was fifteen, spotty, pissed up on cider and determined to smack anyone from Sunderland because they'd just beaten Leicester City. Not because they'd burned down his house and kidnapped his sister, but their 11 men of choice had kicked a ball for 90 minutes to better effect that his 11 men of choice.Passion, Pride, Belief.

It is not healthy for anyone to attach that much importance to something so ephemeral and soulless. As if Glazer really cares about his team's fans as long as they keep buying the replica kts at £55 a time. Sport is for our entertainment, but the industry around it uses us as cash cows to line shareholder's offshore accounts and pay someone who, in the real world, would work on a building site, £25,000 a week to do his hobby for 180 mnutes a week between selling razors, hair products and fizzy drinks. Stick a team logo on anything and watch it sell. While you're at it, get some dim-witted moron in a suit to be photographed smiling at it. The proles will lap it up. Passon, Pride, Belief.

Football is a game. Not a religion, not a philosophy of life, not anything. It's a game. I liked that once they'd cleared the tickertape up from Trafalgar Square, we immediately forgot about cricket. It's fun while it lasts, but it's a game, and one put on for our entertainment. Fans of Coronation Street do not riot when Eastenders gets better ratings at Christmas. I have nothing aganst games. I am looking forward to the Commonwealth Games heartily. I even enjoy the World Cup, in as far as it's a series of games of footy.

But if had my way, I'd sell the FA to the French and laugh as the nation's self-appointed football industry drowned in their own bile.And with that, I'm off to watch the bobsleighing. Good day.

Love
Dougal