The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Location: Kilcullen (Phone 087 7790766), County Kildare, Ireland

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

heelers saves association football

The game of soccer is nearly dead.

The only place where the game of soccer is of any interest and therefore worth saving is England.

Football in England has been irradiated with a negative ethos.

This ethos arose in the management style that prevailed in that country over the past hundred years and from there infected everywhere else.

We may call this ethos Management Football or Safety Soccer. It means every team playing boring defensive rubbish with eleven men huddled around their own goal mouth trying desperately to ensure nothing happens for ninety minutes. The morality of Management Football meant that any manager who risked adopting a more expansive style, would be fired when his team did not win the League. At the end of each year of wall to wall ninety minute bore fests, almost all teams would fail to win the League. Conceivably everyone should be fired. But the only ones fired would be the managers who dared to break ranks and risk letting their teams play real football. Or as in the case of Kevin Keengan, managers who attempted to force their teams to play real football. The negative ethos is exemplified by teams strategising to place one player in an attacker position while holding everyone else at the back. It is a pure and utter negation of the beautiful game.

The negative ethos of football is also exemplifed in England and internationally by the prevalence of another style which I call Hack And Slash Football or Fouler's Football. This means that the favoured strategy for dealing with any opponent who can play creatively or entertainingly, is simply to hack him to the ground. Both Pele in Brazil and George Best in England for all their skills were never really let entertain. They spent most of their careers writhing in agony on the ground. Hack And Slash football has infected and destroyed the game of soccer as truly as Management Football. The greatest apotheosis for Hack And Slash Football was a world cup final between Brazil and Italy when two teams each possessed of hugely skilful players, chose to direct all their energies and genius towards obtaining a nil all draw. Their hope was that the result would be decided, after ninety minutes of scoreless defensive play, by a penalty shoot out. When teams like Brazil and Italy are playing safe, the game is nearly finished.

The negative ethos of football is further demonstrated by the endemic use of drugs by players.

The negative ethos of football is further demonstrated by the practice of all teams in paying players ridiculously inflated wages which those players will never generate for the club.

The negative ethos of football is further demonstrated by a culture within the sport which encourages these overpaid bore-meister players to snarl in the faces of referees and linesmen.

The negative ethos of football is further demonstrated by the paying of bribes by gambling syndicates to linesmen and referees.

The negative ethos of football is further demonstrated by violence among those watching football games which are themselves so boring, that only a violent soccer yob looking for a fight could be bothered attending them.

The solutions are these:

1. Soccer will become a sport featuring nine players on each team.

2. The goals will be made larger so that Management Soccer, Safety Soccer, and Bore Meister Soccer are no longer feasible ways to play the game.

3. The off side rule will be in force only at centre field kick offs. It will then cease to operate.

4. No player will use drugs.

5. No doctor who facilitates drug use, will be allowed to have any association with soccer clubs.

6. Managers and players will be apprised that the game is about entertainment and being the best person they can be.

7. Hack And Slash football will no longer be tolerated. Players who can play will be let play. Players who try to break the ankles of players who can play will be sent off and/or banned from playing.

8. Clubs who wish to remain part of the reformed game will be aware that the game is about entertainment, family values, and the beauty of a physical contest honorably and honestly fought in good fellowship and friendship. You know the half wits will actually start to make profits again if the game gets interesting.

9. There will be zero tolerance for low life overpaid scruff players shouting in the faces of referees. It will simply cease to happen.

10. There will be zero tolerance for referees and linesmen taking bribes from gambling syndicates in Hong Kong.

11. Bruce Grobelaar and that other bribe accepting twit from Gladiators will be given a formal kick in the arse. I mean John Fashanu.

12. Each game will have ten referees who will ask for assistance in difficult decisions from video replays.

13. The practice of demoting teams from different divisions will be abandoned. Teams will have tenure in their divisions. A century of tradition will no longer be wiped out by one bad season. The demotion system has encouraged Hack And Slash Soccer, and Safety Soccer, the most boring display of atrophied human spectacle known across the multiverse.

14. Divisional Conferences around Britain will replace the league tables of old. These Conferences will produce their own champions who will play at year's end for the highest and most prestigious titles.

15. The culture of expansive flowing creative life affirming football will be encouraged.

16. There will be zero tolerance for crowd violence.

17. There will be a modest assured income for players and management with clubs operating like families. Not mafia families. Just families.

18. Clubs will no longer operate like corrupt banks or stock exchange companies. Clubs will only pay money in salaries that they are receiving in revenues. Loans from corrupt banks or stock exchange companies will not count as revenues.

19. Thuggery will not be tolerated in any aspect of the beautiful game.

20. The alternative to these initiatives is for association football/soccer to cease to exist as a vehicle for mass entertainment anywhere on earth.

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