Too many people are watching football on Twitter now.
There’s a formula to all of these big games: The hype; The hate for the over-hype; The boredom from the match; The hate for the match.
Mostly, that boredom and hate comes from people with their phones in their hands and their thumbs at the ready, set to fire out 140 characters of wit before anyone else does, but in the absence of the obligatory seven goals to make a game a good game, it gets a little tougher.
The boredom comes from scanning their Twitter timelines and having to refresh at least three times to get one updated tweet in 10 seconds. The hate quickly follows.
When you see one person giving out about a match, the narrative is set. It snowballs and it nearly seems like everyone is happier for the game to play out as a stalemate because they’re having more fun liking and retweeting.
Announce full time whistle @LFC
— ً (@Jame_dawg) October 17, 2016
There was nothing particularly enthralling about Liverpool and Manchester United on Monday night. But for God’s sake it was Liverpool and Manchester United, you could watch that every night of the week however boring you might deem it. It was two good football teams with massive history, massive rivalry, and massive stakes and it was gripping watching the tension unfold.
In the end, no, it wasn’t a classic. So what?
All we heard the whole way through the Euros was what a shit tournament it was. This game was rubbish and they’re defending and what’s the point. That’s right, we got so spoiled with football every night of the week that we decided we could live without it. Those coughs were soon softened when Germany and Poland were replaced on Thursday nights with Eastenders.
Football is football. It’s a competitive sport where it’s better not to lose and sometimes it’s a little unsatisfying. The same goes for almost every sport on the planet.
Ireland’s summer has only just ended but you can still hear the echoes of the whinges from Gaels. Change the rules, restructure the championship, this is the death of the GAA and bla bla bla. Any team that adopts a defensive approach in Gaelic football are still treated like lepers by the majority of the mainstream media. A handpass is treated with complete contempt. People watch these games unfold on Twitter too and it’s easy to join the narrative. They’re all riling each other up.
Anytime Floyd Mayweather steps into the ring, a stream of abuse follows him because it’s never the epic that the promotion promised it would be. Tyson Fury against Wladimir Klitschko? What a bloody eyesore that was.
Northern hemisphere rugby. That goes a little something like this: The game is in an awful state; Can we not have ONE offload; Too much of this kicking nonsense; What does the future hold for rugby?
You have to wonder if people enjoy any sport at all anymore. You have to wonder why they bother tuning in.
It’s not to completely disagree and call white black. It’s not to say that Liverpool-United was, in actual fact, a good game. Rather, it was one of the best shit games we’ve been treated to in a while.
There were no goals, there weren’t many chances and there was one team who was happy enough with the draw so it was never going to go down as one of the greats. That’s alright. It doesn’t make you a hipster for still enjoying the ride. It doesn’t make you a hipster for still enjoying sport, even if it’s in the duller category – to do that though, you have to accept sport for what it is.
You’re not alternative for marveling at Valencia’s tackle, or for twitching at the pressing game, or for growing a lump in your throat watching Ander Herrera plough around Anfield like a man possessed. It doesn’t make you stupid for having your breath taken away by a goalkeeper you’re starting to think might actually be better than the peerless Gianluigi Buffon.
It was a game of football that saw two good groups of players cancel each other out. It was a big game of football that no-one wanted to throw caution to the wind in. But it was only about as unsatisfying as any other big game; as the last World Cup final or the European Cup final or any final for that matter apart from the rare classics.
And, Jesus, Jose Mourinho was managing a team in a big match away from home. What the hell were we supposed to expect?
Yet people are onto Sky demanding their money back or at least an explanation for hyping up this drivvle as they call it. Just don’t watch it if you don’t enjoy it because, honestly, there was nothing really out of the ordinary about Monday night’s football match that you wouldn’t get in most sports most weeks.
Actually, the most infuriating thing about the game was only Jordan Henderson absolutely hounding and berating boys to give him the ball from five feet away and then he’d just roll it five feet in the other direction and repeat the pattern more and more aggressively and confidently as if what he was doing was important.
As with most things, the hype and the build-up and the glorious anticipation had us believing in what might have been. You come away from the game and you’re still wondering what might have been.
Jose Mourinho didn’t want to leave anything to the chance of ‘might have been’. As with every big game, none of the players wanted to do that either.
Still, the drama and the possibilities will pull us all back in again in a few weeks time. Unfortunately, some will leave it to social media to tell them how they feel about it. The rest might actually just sit back and watch a game of football for once and accept that there’s no pattern or entertainment rules to follow here. It’s just sport.
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