Listen to thisEvery four years the World Cup gives me the opportunity to indulge a tendency to see the world through the lens of a round ball. I notice that Kiaras beat me to it this year in writing about soccer (as he calls it!) last month but I suppose I can revisit the theme knowing how the World Cup ended. Actually, the details of the tournament are already fading in my mind. I know that Spain won and that England didn’t and that Scotland, once again, failed to qualify but other than that it’s all becoming a bit of a blur. I marvel at my son's ability to memorise every detail of any game, recounting scores, scorers, previous clubs of scorers and, as often as not, their weight and favourite breakfast cereal. I rarely remember specifics but that doesn’t stop me from trying to discern 'meaning of life' messages from the game. Equating football with meaning of life questions brings to mind Bill Shankly, the famous Liverpool manager who is credited with saying that “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
The one game I do remember from this year’s World Cup is the England-Germany game. Before any big tournament I always worry that England might be fractionally as good as the media pundits and commentators make them out to be. That, for a Scot, would be bad news. Hearing incessantly about 1966 is bad enough – I wouldn’t want references to be any more up to date. Call it schadenfreude, call it what you will, it’s a fact that no matter how hard I try to put some of my more tribal sentiments behind me, they surface with the first reference to 1966 and “our boys”. I needn’t have worried. My hunch that, actually, England weren’t in the same class as some of the other teams in the tournament was borne out when Germany cuffed them 4-1. Of course, the game will be remembered less for the final score than for the fact that England had a “goal” disallowed that television replays showed was clearly over the goal line. This caused a predictable uproar, with commentators slating the quality of refereeing and demanding goal line technology to avoid any repetition of such an injustice. (Actually, if only goal-line technology had been around in 1966 we might not have to endure those interminable references!)
The pundits and commentators miss the point; it is controversies such as this that make football “the beautiful game” (and as a down-side keeps them in a job). Attempts to sanitise it, to take away the element of unpredictability and passion, risk making it an altogether different beast. While I would argue that football can be as artistic as any more “cultured” art form, it’s difference is that it isn’t directly rehearsed. It’s beauty lies less in technical perfection achieved through meticulous practice of particular moves than in the fact that you don’t know what’s coming next. It’s not just the vagaries of the game itself that those who would want football to mimic opera would prefer to see vanquished. They want to remove any element of the uncouth from it. The media and politicians of particular persuasions tried to make it difficult for Scots to say that, to be honest, they didn’t really want England to do well. Shops selling “Anyone But England” tee-shirts had them removed and were accused of inciting racism. Again, this misunderstands football and sport more generally. To support my case here I came across a section an a book I’m reading just now, which is called “The Meaning of Life”, the kind of light reading I do when I get into holiday mode! The author, Terry Eagleton, notes that sport, and football in particular, “stands up for all those noble causes – religious faith, national sovereignty, personal honour, ethnic identity – for which, over the centuries, people have been prepared to go to their deaths. Sport involves tribal loyalties and rivalries, symbolic rituals, fabulous legends, iconic heroes, epic battles, aesthetic beauty, physical fulfilment, intellectual satisfaction, sublime spectaculars, and a profound sense of belonging”.
There are those who would seek to deny this – to say that it is only a game. They would take any soul and passion out of football. A similar tendency besets residential child care; there are those who would prefer to measure it out in coffee spoons, to have it all neat and tidy, nicely packaged, suitably risk assessed and managed. They want the equivalent of goal-line technology, be it a standardised care plan, an accredited intervention an integrated this and a coordinated that, all of which they believe will take the element of unpredictability out of the task. And when it doesn’t work they blame the referee (or the manager or a colleague). Again, they don’t understand it and likely as not, like the armchair pundits who pontificate about poor refereeing, they probably weren’t very good at the game themselves. What makes a good residential worker, a bit like a good footballer is the ability to see opportunities as they arise, to go with the flow, to express themselves, to do the unpredictable, knowing that while it might not come off nine times out of ten, that when it does it is worth it. It is residential staff who can move beyond being just journeymen to doing things that are just a bit different and special that kids will remember – just like I remember football games that are a bit out of the ordinary.
