It's FA Cup Semi Final weekend this weekend.
As usual one of them is on Sky and one of them on terrestrial TV, and to make it more convenient for people who like to get a multipack of beer in, they're both being shown in the evening (ish). One on Saturday and one on Sunday. This means I'll only be able to watch one of them. I stopped subscribing to Sky years ago. In fact, I wish I'd never joined. Since they started pumping all that money in, the players keep getting richer while the fans keep getting poorer. I think buying a Sky subscription just helps a few people get a lot richer, so I'm not in favour of it, although I would be if I was one of those few. Only age and a lack of natural talent have prevented that from happening.
Anyway, the FA Cup semi-final weekend I remember most fondly is 1990. This was pre-Sky. Both semi finals were on the BBC, and they were on the same day (I think it might have been the first time this had ever happened, at one time they never showed them at all). They were on during the day, and I watched them one after the other. And they just might have been the best two back to back football matches I've ever seen. For the record Crystal Palace beat Liverpool 4-3 and Oldham and Manchester United drew 3-3.
It was as exciting as football gets. I won't attempt to explain why. If you hate football, you'll think I'm nuts, and if you like football you'll know what I mean.
The final was also pretty exciting. Crystal Palace and Manchester United. It finished 3-3 and it had to go to replay (this was before penalty shoot-outs on the day). That same summer it was the World Cup, and Gazza's tears and Lineker's goals and Stuart Pearce's patriotism and Shilton's statue impersonations. In those days, I still looked up to and respected the England team (except for Shilton) and Bobby Robson was there, and if we were disappointed watching at home on TV, losing in the semi-final to Germany or West Germany, how disappointed must they have been? And when they came home, they were treated like heroes, because they were, because they were good, and they came so close, not like the last lot in 2010, who were run ragged by some German kids, so much so that instead of sharing the collective gloom of defeat, I was laughing by the end. Ruth came in at one point, and she hasn't a clue about football, but even she could tell England were hopeless, and she was laughing too, at how easy the Germans were finding it to score.
Anyway, back to the FA Cup. What I wanted to say was this. And this is one of the things I still don't understand about football. And about commentators in particular. Why is it, that in a game where the entire point of the game is to score goals, it is considered amazing, incredible, unbelievable even, when goals are scored? Especially when the game finishes 3-3 for example. That means that 22 fit blokes have been running round aiming at the goals for an hour and a half, and they've only managed to succeed in getting it in there 6 times. Sometimes there aren't any goals at all, and they don't even get a shot in at the goalie. As I once heard Brian Clough say when he was being interviewed at Waterstone's in Middlesbrough. The goals don't move. Why don't footballers know this?
I suppose one answer to this question is obvious. Not all 22 are kicking the ball the same way. Half of them are trying to stop the other half from scoring. I'm sure my plumber would have had a lot harder job, plumbing in my toilet if while he was trying to do it, another plumber was trying to get in the way, and stop him. Thankfully, that's not how plumbers work. It's not usually competitive, once they're on site.
And I know the pitch is big, and the goals are small, and I know they even have a guy on each team whose job it is to stand in the middle of the goal and try and stop the ball going in. And he can even use his hands!
I'm not saying scoring goals is easy. I played football competitively about a hundred times, and I only scored about 10 goals. 4 of them were in the same game against a really crap team, and another 3 were scored in two games against a team of tiny kids who looked like they were playing in the wrong age group. Another one accidentally went in off the back of my head and another one I scored after I'd had about 10 chances and missed them all, and I nearly managed to get the one I did get in saved and if the young boy chasing it as it trickled over the line hadn't tripped it probably wouldn't have made it.
So no, I'm not saying it's easy. What I'm saying is that when it happens, it's not amazing. It's not incredible, it's not unbelievable. It's normal. Some goals are amazing, but a few goals in the same game is not. It's the whole point of the game. Stop trying to make it sound better than it is. Stop labelling things with adjectives.
It's like when somebody prefaces a story with 'It's actually quite a funny story...'. These stories are never funny. Another thing football commentators do during a good game, is tell you what a great advertisement it is for football. No other sport does this!
In my opinion, the unintended consequence of saying how unbelievable it is when goals are scored, and of telling us what a great advertisement it is for football when the game is entertaining, is that by implication they are also saying that most of the time football is total crap.......
....ah well, that explains it then.
As usual one of them is on Sky and one of them on terrestrial TV, and to make it more convenient for people who like to get a multipack of beer in, they're both being shown in the evening (ish). One on Saturday and one on Sunday. This means I'll only be able to watch one of them. I stopped subscribing to Sky years ago. In fact, I wish I'd never joined. Since they started pumping all that money in, the players keep getting richer while the fans keep getting poorer. I think buying a Sky subscription just helps a few people get a lot richer, so I'm not in favour of it, although I would be if I was one of those few. Only age and a lack of natural talent have prevented that from happening.
Anyway, the FA Cup semi-final weekend I remember most fondly is 1990. This was pre-Sky. Both semi finals were on the BBC, and they were on the same day (I think it might have been the first time this had ever happened, at one time they never showed them at all). They were on during the day, and I watched them one after the other. And they just might have been the best two back to back football matches I've ever seen. For the record Crystal Palace beat Liverpool 4-3 and Oldham and Manchester United drew 3-3.
It was as exciting as football gets. I won't attempt to explain why. If you hate football, you'll think I'm nuts, and if you like football you'll know what I mean.
The final was also pretty exciting. Crystal Palace and Manchester United. It finished 3-3 and it had to go to replay (this was before penalty shoot-outs on the day). That same summer it was the World Cup, and Gazza's tears and Lineker's goals and Stuart Pearce's patriotism and Shilton's statue impersonations. In those days, I still looked up to and respected the England team (except for Shilton) and Bobby Robson was there, and if we were disappointed watching at home on TV, losing in the semi-final to Germany or West Germany, how disappointed must they have been? And when they came home, they were treated like heroes, because they were, because they were good, and they came so close, not like the last lot in 2010, who were run ragged by some German kids, so much so that instead of sharing the collective gloom of defeat, I was laughing by the end. Ruth came in at one point, and she hasn't a clue about football, but even she could tell England were hopeless, and she was laughing too, at how easy the Germans were finding it to score.
Anyway, back to the FA Cup. What I wanted to say was this. And this is one of the things I still don't understand about football. And about commentators in particular. Why is it, that in a game where the entire point of the game is to score goals, it is considered amazing, incredible, unbelievable even, when goals are scored? Especially when the game finishes 3-3 for example. That means that 22 fit blokes have been running round aiming at the goals for an hour and a half, and they've only managed to succeed in getting it in there 6 times. Sometimes there aren't any goals at all, and they don't even get a shot in at the goalie. As I once heard Brian Clough say when he was being interviewed at Waterstone's in Middlesbrough. The goals don't move. Why don't footballers know this?
I suppose one answer to this question is obvious. Not all 22 are kicking the ball the same way. Half of them are trying to stop the other half from scoring. I'm sure my plumber would have had a lot harder job, plumbing in my toilet if while he was trying to do it, another plumber was trying to get in the way, and stop him. Thankfully, that's not how plumbers work. It's not usually competitive, once they're on site.
And I know the pitch is big, and the goals are small, and I know they even have a guy on each team whose job it is to stand in the middle of the goal and try and stop the ball going in. And he can even use his hands!
I'm not saying scoring goals is easy. I played football competitively about a hundred times, and I only scored about 10 goals. 4 of them were in the same game against a really crap team, and another 3 were scored in two games against a team of tiny kids who looked like they were playing in the wrong age group. Another one accidentally went in off the back of my head and another one I scored after I'd had about 10 chances and missed them all, and I nearly managed to get the one I did get in saved and if the young boy chasing it as it trickled over the line hadn't tripped it probably wouldn't have made it.
So no, I'm not saying it's easy. What I'm saying is that when it happens, it's not amazing. It's not incredible, it's not unbelievable. It's normal. Some goals are amazing, but a few goals in the same game is not. It's the whole point of the game. Stop trying to make it sound better than it is. Stop labelling things with adjectives.
It's like when somebody prefaces a story with 'It's actually quite a funny story...'. These stories are never funny. Another thing football commentators do during a good game, is tell you what a great advertisement it is for football. No other sport does this!
In my opinion, the unintended consequence of saying how unbelievable it is when goals are scored, and of telling us what a great advertisement it is for football when the game is entertaining, is that by implication they are also saying that most of the time football is total crap.......
....ah well, that explains it then.
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