Katherine Grainger

The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct; part 3.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

So now we have the Para’s – is it okay to call them the Para’s? And more genuinely stirring and even remarkable sporting stuff to satiate that proper-joy-meets-nationalist-frisson-thing. A summer of smiling madly and wondering if that’s okay? C’mon… that reading and thinking stuff is … okay… but… give it a rest! BOUNCE – bounce and clap!! TOGETHER!

For life is simple and sport is good and gold is only gold. And these Olympics – these sports – can surely be enjoyed disproportionately in the moment but returned to the real life context promptly. Contemplate later if you will the alarming inconsistencies twixt ‘glory’ and gory chauvinism/materialism midst the nose-bagging or could it be appeasement of our most bovine requirements – for fast-food highlights watchable from our Pringle-caked sofas? If you will. Afterwards. Or not – I’m a fan, me.

So either relax or have fraught moments of post-modernist angst before keeping it simple. And celebrating – continuing to celebrate – on the Brit-funded, Brit-led and spun carousel. Every day there will be a fabulous and a winning smile as our athletes respond magnificently to the world-beating support in the world-class venues. Every day somebody will talk inspiringly modestly and generously of their achievement being rooted in their team, in us. And this sits somewhere rather proudly between heart-warming and outright wonderful. If you just believe.

The thread of my Conduct posts – which I promise I am returning to – has been woven crudely around this un 21st Century wholesomeness; the nature of TeamsGB being so contingent upon, so lifted by some recognition of (dare I use the word communal?) good stuff we might call spirit. It’s something surprisingly pure, this thing – their connection with, even their reliance upon a real and conceptual us. Time after time we have seen athletes rise to the challenge, even when the pressures seem absurdly charged agin them; they’ve performed; they’ve thrived. And this is one of the key things that separates them from (for example) England footballers.

There could be a specific charge here, that Team England FC have perennially wilted when their Olympic equivalents came around. I am more interested in broader charges against the game of football – or allegedly top level football – and its indulged protagonists.

My first two posts on this subject spilt their six-pack of beery moralistic banter around dubious ‘comparisons’ between the Olympic brilliance/properpeople combo as epitomised by Katherine Grainger/Mo Farrah/Justaboutallofthem,actually and (say) Rio Ferdinand. Following that massacre, in which it was scientifically proven that too many footballers really are wankers with the sensitivity of er… oil tankers, I begin to reconstruct the football model in a Danny Boyle-like pastorale. Because diving, screaming abuse at the ref and owning 5 rolexes is well out of order, right? So.

In this anarchic tumble I will again try to key you in to football’s anti-gems – the dollops of doo in the matrix – suggestive or reflective of wider issues. If this seems obtuse, my counter would be simply that I reckon fans feel like this, in spluttering, impassioned bulletpoints. It’s personal. Stuff that gets my wick then, includes;

  • Strikers seeking only to ‘draw’ a foul, or better still a penalty whilst bearing down on goal –or, increasingly, anywhere on the goddam pitch. The traditionally burning, gurning desire of the No. 9 to smash one in the top corner now being gone.
  • Pretending to be religious whilst crossing the threshold of the park.
  • Endless and often aggressive abuse of the referee/officials.
  • Petty appealing for ‘everything’, including everything that patently isn’t ‘ours.’
  • Diving and acting and the generally associated trying to get a fellow pro (hah!) sent off.
  • Note to above; in particular the diabolical histrionics around any slight contact with the face. I’ve seen Scotty Parker – otherwise a proper throwback to good ole English terrierhood – feign acid attack to his fizzog; unforgivable. And diabolically prevalent.
  • That general crassness around money.
  • That general crassness around seemingly knowing the value of nothing.
  • Specifically on Teams England FC – even given their prevailing mediocrity – the galling lack of achievement when Big Days arrive. (And I’m not just talking about penalties.)
  • More than this, the stultifyingly dull and ungenerous manner in which England teams have performed in these major tournaments. Where they play no meaningful football; where they seem pale unbelieving shadows… barely even ticking the ‘honest triers’ box. This chronic unbelief, this inability to rise when atmospheres are at their most magnificent is surely hugely telling of their relative smallness as people as well as damning of England systems? It’s what makes fans wonder if they care… and rightly or wrongly, football fans watching our Olympians and Paralympians will and do wonder why the hell the footballers can’t lift their game like this. Sorry… did I go off on one ?

Much of this counts as a digression I know. So I will attempt to retreat to my argument over Gentlemanly Conduct.

The crassness in Premiership football combined with the Hodgson-led slink back (apparently) to philosophies 30 years plus out of date means there is a crisis in the soul of English football; a real one. It may be business as usual in the Prem but it’s a sour business. Particularly when compared to the smiley-roundedness of what we have seen on tracks, on water and generally all over this summer. Nobody believes in the players because they are mercenaries. They dive, they cheat, they lack much of what is broadly regarded to be sporting. The managers routinely offend our intelligence, either through blandly pursuing the Offer Nothing ritual that is the ‘face the cameras’ moment, or, in the case of someone like the now departed Dalglish, by being actively hostile to the notion that folks might want to know something. Something real. The presiding emotions – if any are apparent – are closer to a kind of barbarism than sport. And football is… a sport.

My Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct is a loose and I hope likeably unthreatening but genuine call for that tumbleweed moment to turn into that lightbulb moment; for some change. Footie is so in my blood it’s not true; yet I find myself turning elsewhere, increasingly, for that daft but preciously sustaining glimpse of triumph or grace. Because too much in the game is not good enough; leading me to ask why and what might be done.

My conclusion is that a recalibration of notions of respect – and the Law of the Game around this – is necessary. This seems central to the major problems (and major turn-offs), namely the poor or disrespectful or dishonest conduct of players and managers.

It’s one of the great no-brainers of world sport that footballers must be in whatever way works re-educated in terms of their relationship with referees in particular. This will probably mean bans for abuse, fines in the modern era being sadly meaningless. Beyond this, I contend there really is a role for some panel of wise men or women who review controversial moments or incidents that in some way bring the game into disrepute. They should be empowered to penalise offenders against sportsmanship as well as the Laws of the Game.

I realise the difficulties around such a panel but see little hope for improvements unless at some stage player X is materially judged against for obvious simulation – for example. If this necessitates changes or extensions to the laws so be it; that might where that politically unsound but retrievable Ungentlemanly Conduct concept comes in.  Making things or people better.  Then 3 former players or officials in a room – job done.

Us fans feel that stuff is wrong and needs righting somehow. Having a foot in other sporting camps I can tell you that rugbyfolks and cricketers and sportsfolk generally really are offended and really do relentlessly mock the arrogance and the lack of honour (however pompous that might sound) amongst footballers. The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct has been (and is) about representing that amorphous groundswell-thing against crap in football. Crap behaviour, crap attitudes, crap awareness. Football… take a look at yourself.

The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct; part two.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Previously I have made heartfelt but no doubt ludicrous generalisations about TeamGBsters being better people than say… Rio Ferdinand, the Olympics having shown up the inadequacies of our football stars through the inconsiderate revelation of dee-lightful rowing chap after unassumingly lush cyclistess. Rio – a deliberately relatively inoffensive choice, as it ‘appens – in interview, would stand no chance against… well… against any of them. Imagine the poor fellah pitched into some comparison with (specimen-of-all-specimens?) Katherine Grainger. Nuff sed.

I hope to move on from this unlicensed judgementalism by getting further into the issue of, the contrasts re respect in sport. This is something even I slightly fear threatens to align me with a currently mercifully subterranean (to-the-point-of-imaginary, actually) arch-conservative group fronted by that former decathlete now eminent flopster/middle distance scapegoat Michael Gove but such are the dangers of the hunt for the righteous . (On that political orientation thing I will just confirm that my own lunacy tends to spring awkwardly from the softish left rather than the anal right.) However because  footballers do seem to have no respect and this does I think draw more flak than almost any other complaint against yer Rooney and yer Terry, stuff must surely be said.  About respect.  But… respect for what?

Broadly, the Olympians – our Olympians, for let’s be honest, we didn’t see too much of the rest of the world’s – were universally received as beacons of treble-fabulous good; partly, surely, because of the obvious contrast with footballers? Wherever you looked there was modesty and rounded good-humour of the sort last seen in football circa 1953 when some bloke called Matthews skipped round a bewildered First Division whilst supping mild, knitting nightcaps and discovering the potato; all to general hat-throwing acclaim.

Now the accuracy or validity of any emotion against shallowness, arrogance and disturbing unworldliness amongst footballers may be open to debate.  It is nevertheless certain that large chunks of us – even those who consider ourselves fans – feel they behave, in the widely used vernacular, like wankers. This is often due to their petulance or lack of respect for officials. We understand that players have in the moment some urgent need to express disappointment or to otherwise ‘react’. It does not follow that this reaction might need to be so essentially cheap.

In rugby circles the drama-queendom and simulation in soccer means coaches tear into footballers for precisely these shameful or cynical episodes – acting or disrespectful and inflammatory celebrations being particularly offensive to the rugby community. Coaches in the 15-man game do routinely warn their own players against such dishonour, such poncification – I know, in coaching rugby myself, I have done this.

So it really is true that footballers are held in contempt by many in the rugby community. How many of them appreciate this, I wonder? Or feel the moral depth of that contempt? Would such awareness make any difference? Unknowable – so let’s get back to rules; respect.

First I should probably mention that for those unfamiliar with footielaw (and footie does have Laws not Rules, interestingly or not) Law 12 now includes what was previously recognised as the Ungentlemanly Conduct Law. Now if I understand it correctly kindof subsumed into Fouls and Misconduct, this throwback to the age of honour and imperial plunder is still in use for discretionary expression by refs and, more commonly, though with little discretion, in the bullshitfest that is general discussion and punditry around the game. I think it’s chronically under-used potential reiner-in of modern ills.

For surely this anachronistic, slightly pompous-sounding Ungentlemanly Conduct thing has rather a lot going for it – or could have – alongside its weirdly inappropriate non-PCness, which we need to recognise.

For one thing it unashamedly implies a kind of moral compass; suggesting in its dangerously dated manner that some woolly goodness, some reflection even may be beneficial to the game. (A note here that perhaps you don’t need to be a misogynist traditionalist necessarily to applaud transgenerational sporting values.) Secondly, its non-specificity lends itself to flexibility and discretion. Thirdly, football needs something to latch onto, some cause to cling to or gather around and it may be that post a wonderfully enervating/invigorating and sporting Olympics this notion of good or ‘gentlemanly’ conduct might just help football re-brand. It certainly might help those trying to keep the thing in order.

So let’s just contemplate again, specifically, this thing football has with referees, with its ‘bastards in black’ and on this occasion I promise to jink Steve Coppell-style outside considerations of race before arcing in my devastating cross/theory thing.

We can get a grip on them – referees – there’s something really grabbable in both physical and conceptual terms about their starchy, often geeky authoritarianism drawing them in to our malevolent clutches. They are an almost reassuringly resented presence in football –uniquely so? – there being an extraordinary hostile confluence of opinion upon their role, their nature even.  (But that’s weird, right?)

Led with extravagant charmlessness by the top players and the managers, we the footie public at large – watching either semi-naked on some frosted terrace or listening in to Allan Green whilst our Porsches scoot silently through leafy Mayfair – love to abuse them. We love to abuse them psychotically in fact, with the fullness of our hearts for… for being the ref.

There is a thesis to be written on this alone, this murderous international antipathy to that bloke or woman in the middle; whatever they do; however, pretty much, they do it.
Later, dwarlings, later…

The quality of the abuse of referees in football is peculiarly obscene and its occurrence peculiarly prevalent. It never ends. The players are obviously and enormously culpable in this, as are the managers and there seems to be no significant will from any direction to curb this wholly degrading aspect of the game.

Let me be clear on this. In 2012 swearing is barely an issue – or at least not an issue of the import of racism or homophobia for example. But swearing aggressively and repeatedly and abusively at a referee or an official is. It’s truly an offence in the wider sense of the word and I find it extraordinary that it still goes relatively unpunished season after season.

Very few players are ever actually sent off or banned following such outbursts, yet we see them in gruesome, fulsome high definition in almost every match as players react appallingly to unfavourable decisions. And I know players are under more pressure in the modern game – truly, they are – the exposure being massively greater, the rewards being financially greater. This is no way, however, excuses a disgracefully poor level of discipline amongst players and managers in this regard.

Pity the referees – support the referees I say – with video playback and meaningful assistance from an empowered fourth official and beyond. Currently the man in the middle is utterly undermined by dishonesty and malcontent all around. He or she is there, the Martians have concluded, to collect our madnesses; like some spitbowl for the twisted soul of humanity. And they are in black.

With both a million years of dodgy symbolism and John Terry railed up against them, what chance do referees have?

Well how about if they had a panel of respected footiefolks in their corner? And what if that panel reviewed obviously controversial or mishandled incidents with a view to issuing correctives in the form of warnings or bans to those guilty of (say?) bringing the game into disrepute?

If this group of Goodies riding in to save footie from itself really were concerned to aggressively promote sportsmanship as well as good decision-making, might it even be appropriate for them to use the moniker The Campaign for Gentlemanly Conduct?  Thereby staking a claim on that apparently unnaproachably difficult playing surface… The Higher Ground.

People… there’s more to come on this.