Urgent Announcement

With so much football on TV these days we are in danger of running out of commentators

- Harry Pearson

Over the past few years I’ve got quite used to hearing the bloke behind me saying things like “Did you watch Stal Kamianske against Vorskla Poltava last night?” and his mate behind me replying “Nah, I had the Svenska Cupen on, BK Forward were at home and I have always had a soft spot for the lads from Orebro”.

Last April, on a cruelly cold spring day, in a town where tattooing and tanning are the bedrock of the economy, the bloke behind me told his mate behind me that he had prepared for an international tournament-free summer by recording the entire MLS season. “If I limit myself to two games a day it should see me through,” he said grimly, like a man planning for nuclear winter. “Is it any good, the American stuff?” his friend responded. “It’s football, isn’t it?” the bloke behind me answered in a tone shuffling inexorably towards the desperate like an encroaching defensive wall.

There was a time when TV football was available only in limited quantities. We complained of course, just as we did about the pubs shutting at 10.30pm in rural areas – except during high summer when an extra 30 minutes was added for those of us who’d been out in the fields harvesting the barley or building a wicker man. Perhaps the authorities recognised football’s addictive properties. For just as certain races have a genetic predisposition to alcoholic self-destruction, so I have come to feel that giving too much football to the English is hazardous.