‘It’s not something we like to talk about but let’s deal with it first and get it out the way.’
That line from an adulterer with ears was indicative of the bilge that poured from the mouths of commentators and pundits across the land yesterday.
You have to love it when the football fraternity tries to scramble aboard its high horse. That horse was pulped for premiership brand adhesive long ago. They were all at it yesterday though. Particularly when it comes from those who ply it, the pritt sticks in the throat.
‘I just want to watch a game of football’ said Helen Chamberlin on BSkyB’s ‘soccer am’, which of course directly preceded BSkyB’s early kick-off showdown.
My objection to that statement is at least twoooo fold: Firstly she is a she and secondly she is every bit a company man.
Helen is, like me, a girl. I’m not a doctor but it’s indisputable that from within our lovely lady lumpage emanate chemicals that make us crave three things: Chocolate, Shoes and Soap. Not the self-cleaning-stuff, that admittedly we do bloody love in a bewildering array of shapes and smells, the other kind of soap…soap opera.
Set against this fact and by proxy her breasts, her exquisite breasts, Helen’s hypocrisy is transparent. How could she pretend? I know girls love soap, you know we love soap, Hells Bells knows it and, God knows, Tulisia knows it.
‘Man Dem Don’t Shake Dem Hand Dem Snub Snub’, as it’s being dubbed by the N-Dub, was the finest moment in soap since ‘The Mini Throng in the Lily Pond’, when Alexis and Krystle got it – right on – long before Rupert had established his ‘Dynasty’. One that fittingly, if coincidently, took hold of English football just as the last bastion built by moral men crumbled.
What jars about Helen’s quote, along with the hypocrisy of the day and indeed the entire modern game, is that it’s rich.
She could have been honest and told us her company would bring us John Terry’s head in all new, 3-D in some pubs, high definition, stocks. Then we might have been better able to bear the weight of the rotten tomatoes in our hands and ‘Sky’ subscriptions on our conscience. She did not.
Though the lady did protesteth, football has become inseparable from soap opera. In the light of yesterday’s events the muddled words of Stuart Pearce, a man so cruelly robbed of the option of ‘letting his feet do the talking’, have been given new clarity.
He told the Metro newspaper a few weeks ago:
‘The bottom line is, it’s a matter for John, his family and everyone concerned in the matter.’
Be they French model, Saudi Prince, Icelandic banker or debt laden American it would appear that, with regard to the modern English game, indeed ‘everyone is concerned in the matter’.
Some of us are deeply concerned.
