The game's gone bonkers

[derby1884]

--Man City win 18 on the trot in what purports to be the most competitive league in Europe.

--Mourinho complains that a £300,000,000 investment is insufficient to "compete"

--Liverpool pay £75,000,000 for a centre-half who, 30 years ago, the same club would have sold to Bolton Wanderers for £250,000.

--double-barrelled surnames used to be as rare as hen's teeth (remember Forbes Phillipson-Masters?)...........now no team is complete without one.

--the next two World Cup tournaments are being held in countries which, were you to be asked "which two countries would you feel are least suitable to host a World Cup", might feature quite high on your list.

--the Champions League continues to go through the motions until the quarter-finals when the tournament has managed to dispose of all those annoying "little" clubs clogging the whole thing up. And the "big boys" can get on with the main event.

--the Europa League continues to meekly accept the bias levelled against it by hosting its matches on a Thursday - the one night of the week which, traditionally, has never hosted matches. Why does Arsenal v Borisov clash with Liverpool v Seville?

Something's up with the game.
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[bluefatnose]

You're absolutely right. But there's still something about it that grips you and pulls you in. Two football incidents stand out for me this season:

1. Benevento v AC Milan (check it out on You Tube). Benevento had lost their first 14 League matches in their first ever season in Serie A. Sitting on 0 points, they weren't expected to get much out of the game. Trailing 1-2 with 94 minutes gone, they won a free kick. Their goalkeeper went forward and scored with a brilliant diving header to earn a 2-2 draw. The crowd went ballistic!!!

2. Jermaine Defoe, often maligned as a money grabber, really touched me, the way he befriended young Bradley Lowery before his death. It wasn't for the publicity or limelight, he did it because he cared. Hospital visits, calling round to Bradley's parents house, wearing an England shirt with Bradley's name on it at the young boys funeral, all went unnoticed by most of the press.

Sheer unexpected ecstacy the former and pure decency and humanity the latter. Surely what football's all about.

[derby1884]

Agree with you on the Benevento match. It was a great moment and, even if the club are relegated, so what? No one can take that away from them.

Every season has its share of memorable stories but I just find that I'm having to go further down the pyramid - as each year goes by - to find them.

My favourite this season was the story which went a bit viral of the handful of Gateshead fans who made the 774 mile round trip to Torquay United on a dire weather Tuesday evening earlier this month.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/spo.....rquay.html

They're fans - proper fans - but how many these days are quite happy to sit behind a keyboard moaning and groaning because Chelsea/Arsenal/Man Utd aren't top?
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[Dorking]

It's the tv date changes that are winding me up lately.

Not just the short notice - near the end of the season you get just 4 or 5 weeks notice of when your games are actually going to be played rather then the work of fiction which is the original fixture list...

but the broad range of possible days and times. 12 noon on a Sunday, not because its a derby game required to be played then by the police to keep things calm, but for Huddersfield v Bournemouth just so people in Asia can watch a game at a time in the evening to suit them. Never mind that Bournemouth fans will have to leave at 4am!

The FA Cup games which can often take a week to be scheduled before you can be sure of when to book a train, hotel or even just time off work if unlucky enough to be away on the Friday or Monday night on tv

Its just bloody annoying

[silkman1]

All absolutely correct and you can include for me the stupid tattoos and the even sillier hair cuts. One has one all have one. Oh and the even sillier celebrations!!

[Grumpypants]

Totally agree with Silkman. A case of far too much money and not enough brain capacity to know what to do with it.

[pompeypete]

Football as we know it RIP



but money talks......

Now they want to show premiership matches on saturday evening.

Players in tip top condition cant play 2 or 3 times a week

weakened teams in the FAC and League cup

U21 teams in the checkatrade cup

Lack of english owners & managers

the list is endless

(still you wont catch me watching "plastic football"

and If my team played their reserves like Newcastle v man city, I,ll be off....(still newcastle may have last laugh & stay up on goal difference)
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[foxes1]

I blame my club Leicester City for clubs spending ridiculous amounts of money on players. I mean we can't have clubs like Leicester and others of a similar size winning the Premiership again can we.

[Flaming Pie]

Couldn't agree more with bluefatnose,, regarding Jermaine Defoe and the help he gave little Bradley and his family. Jermaine was an absolute star .l remember last season some of Bradley s family went into the Everton dressing room before their away game against Sunderland. They told them that they had set up an appeal fund for special cancer treatment for the boy and asked the Blues would they like to make a donation. ?, They came out of the room gobsmacked, holding a cheque for £ 250,000. Both Everton and Sunderland were fantastic with Bradley. . Not much class on the pitch at the moment from the School of Science, ,, but they will always be a classy club!

[Flaming Pie]

Couldn't agree more with bluefatnose,, regarding Jermaine Defoe and the help he gave little Bradley and his family. Jermaine was an absolute star .l remember last season some of Bradley s family went into the Everton dressing room before their away game against Sunderland. They told them that they had set up an appeal fund for special cancer treatment for the boy and asked the Blues would they like to make a donation. ?, They came out of the room gobsmacked, holding a cheque for £ 250,000. Both Everton and Sunderland were fantastic with Bradley. . Not much class on the pitch at the moment from the School of Science, ,, but they will always be a classy club!

[Five and In]

Great thread and I agree with all the points already made.

For me the demise of the game can be traced back to the emergence of Sky throwing money at it and the birth of the Premier League.

It really rankles with me when they throw statistics at us stating it's the best ever whatever in Premiership history when we all know that there are loads of better totals in the pre-Premiership era.
The perfect example this week is Harry Kane passing the calendar year goals total. A great achievement obviously, but when I heard them spouting off that he was one goal away from becoming Spurs second highest ever goalscorer behind Jermain Defoe, I spat my coffee out.
In our all time list, Harry is tenth. A certain Mr Greaves is still 144 in front of him, but failed to score any in the Premier League, so he doesn't count anymore in their eyes.

The other statistic I hate is when they drone on about how far any particular player has run during the game.
What counts is where they run and when they make the run otherwise we should all sign Forrest Gump if distance is what counts now.

Rant over.......I think

[Five and In]

Five and In wrote:

Rant over.......I think

Sorry, it's not over!!

Gloves when it's not cold.

Empty seats with ten minutes to go when it's still all to play for.

Domestic cup draws being held in Outer Mongolia or wherever they did it.

Badge kissing by players apart from the likes of Mark Noble who loves his club.

Silly dancing goal celebrations.

Despite all the crap.........I still love the game, but if I think of Liverpool it's Dalglish and Keegan that come to mind and not Mane and Firminho.
For Man Utd it's Best and Law, not Pogba or Zlatan.

etc etc

[Tynie Topics]

Anyone else getting increasingly annoyed with players covering their mouths with their hands when talking? started off in Spain and is now creeping in over here. Stop it!
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[littlewiggy]

I'm going to have to show great restraint here given the subject matter, otherwise it'd likely be the longest post ever written on the FPC given my obsessive hatred of the modern game.

So I'll add just one of my biggest bugbears ... WATCHING FOOTBALL IS NOT A CRIME!

The way fans are treated going to away games, frogmarched about by the law, held for hours in service stations, threatened with physical violence for trying to buy chips, etc etc, is nothing short of a disgrace.

Round here, if six football fans have a fight in the street, it's front page news, usually under the heading of "Mindless Scum."

Meanwhile, nine miles down the road, the capital city of Wales gets smashed up on a regular basis every time the peanut-huggers play.
It's absolute carnage on the streets at night after a big game, with blood & piss everywhere, and the local A&E stretched to breaking point.

This however merits no column inches, none, zero, polo hole, natch - as it's purely "Hi-jinks" and "Horseplay" you know.

#watchingfootballisnotacrime
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[Flaming Pie]

I remember staying at a caravan site in Fishguard over 30 years ago Wiggy. We would sit and chat with a Welsh family in the clubhouse, our kids had palled up with their kids. . The conversation turned to football and rugby. The bloke was a tough Welsh miner.l recall him saying that he had gone off going to the rugby because of the drunkeness and mayhem surrounding it on big international days in Cardiff. Sounds like all these years later, nothing has changed.As you said, it's not really reported in the media.

[Westbourne]

The six top Premier League teams.. All cry baby buntings, all the rest don't have a chance of winning anything.. Bring back the good old days

[littlewiggy]

Flaming Pie wrote:

I remember staying at a caravan site in Fishguard over 30 years ago Wiggy. We would sit and chat with a Welsh family in the clubhouse, our kids had palled up with their kids. . The conversation turned to football and rugby. The bloke was a tough Welsh miner.l recall him saying that he had gone off going to the rugby because of the drunkeness and mayhem surrounding it on big international days in Cardiff. Sounds like all these years later, nothing has changed.As you said, it's not really reported in the media.

Spot on mate, nothing has changed - quite the opposite - even Newport town centre is utter bedlam after a rugger International, with all the three-times-a-season, replica shirt-wearing fatties causing mayhem.

Never gets mentioned in the 'Gus (local paper).

Yet a County fan drops a Big Mac carton in the High Street and it warrants a special "Editorial" about those vile football scumbags, complete with cctv "Wanted" pictures.
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[highlandjambo]

How can a player from the Diddy Scottish league sell for £13 million pounds and 2 years later be worth £75 million pounds, More money than sence springs to mind, its bloody obscene.

[gfcpaul]

Has nobody mentioned the Chelsea hot water bottle.

[Flaming Pie]

Chelsea, the first team l ever saw wearing gloves. They ran out to play Tranmere FA Cup Jan 1963 wearing yellow gloves. Mind you, it was in the snow during one of the coldest winters on record.