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Why football is like death, copulation and wildlife television

2 December 2015 by Simon Barnes 8 Comments

I have discovered a new vice. Like all vices it will pall soon enough, but right now I’m really rather taken. It’s the Champions League round-up programme on BT/ESPN, and it allows you to watch all the matches at the same time. But only the sexy bits.

So you go from goal to goal to goal, taking in the occasional missed penalty and red card. None of the dull bits like one player passing to another, none of the stuff of sustained attack and determined defence, none of the narrative that allows a single player to stand out, none of those momentum shifts that can be traced back to a single, apparently trivial incident.

There’s no pattern to what you see, no understanding to be reached. There’s no logic to the events, and for that matter, no sudden drastic break in the logic when a game turns on a sixpence. It’s a cake that’s all cherries… so it’s no cake at all.

And it occurred to me, as I watched yet another dizzying swoop from one crisis to another crisis 400 miles away, that it was a lot like watching a wildlife documentary. Nothing but kills and copulations: action all the way.

I have spent hours with lions in the wild. Literally hours. Literally hundreds of hours. And in all that time I’ve seen maybe half-dozen kills and one copulation. Well, if you sit through 90 minutes of a football match, you may see only one goal, or none.

Perhaps they should make a real-time documentary about lions across, say, 24 hours. Of that perhaps 19 hours would be devoted to sleep. A fair bit more would be given to apparently aimless walking about. Some would be about fruitless stalking, never even getting close.

Footballers aren’t trying to entertain you, they’re trying to win a football match. Wild animals aren’t there to put on a show: they’re getting on with their lives. But sometimes, just sometimes, a human can have the privilege of breathing the same air for a while.

And that’s richer than all the wildlife television ever broadcast. Television can be great — and the best thing it can do is lead you to the real thing. The worst it can do is to create an expectation that the wild world is all goals and red cards. But it’s not. It much better than that…

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Posted in Sportsblog/ Wildblog

Comments

  1. Anthony Bird says

    3 December 2015 at 10:38 am

    All very true, Simon, but I think what I might miss if I ever got the opportunity to watch lions going about their daily business, would be Sir David being his usual forthright self when telling me how close we are to losing the lot!

    Reply
    • Simon Barnes says

      6 December 2015 at 12:23 pm

      I hope you get the chance to put that theory to the test. Real lions close by upstage just about everything else in the universe – perhaps even DA.

      Reply
  2. wes pickering says

    3 December 2015 at 11:49 am

    absolutely Simon- thats life for us all, lots of just aimless wandering, with a few bits of glory if we are lucky.
    then replaying the tape over and over.The ability to be thrilled by the everyday is the key.
    i think you have observed this many times, in many ways.

    Reply
    • Simon Barnes says

      6 December 2015 at 12:22 pm

      Just breathing the same air as fabulous wild things is good enough for me – but I have to accept that this doesn’t make great television.

      Reply
  3. Steve Wilson says

    5 December 2015 at 8:40 pm

    I can’t match lion bonking for live entertainment but the 2004 Second Division play offs semi-final came close. Bristol City scoring twice in the last two minutes to make the final. Graham Poll reffing, said Ashton Gate was louder than the Nou Camp.
    ‘That’s why we’ve put up with seven years of crap’ said my friend Russ – the poet. Of course it’s only sport. Of course it doesn’t matter. And of course we lost the play off final.

    Reply
    • Simon Barnes says

      6 December 2015 at 12:18 pm

      That’s sport all right!

      Reply
  4. andrew meredith davies sibton says

    20 January 2016 at 4:13 pm

    Beautiful article in today’s independent. Thank you Simon.

    Reply
    • Simon Barnes says

      21 January 2016 at 5:30 pm

      Thank you very much, they made it look very good.

      Reply

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