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The "wunnerful" game. Not.

Although old enough to know better (in fact, really, really old enough to know better), I do enjoy a foray onto Facebook. For all we older ones may deride it, I have found that particular site has put me back in touch with people who simply dropped out of my life thirty years ago.

In fairness, they tended to drop out because I was brought up in Dublin (Ireland, for those of you lacking in geographical knowledge), but now live in Yorkshire (England, for those of you still lacking in geographical knowledge). And it happened well before the internet age. Or at least at the time when Tim Berners-Lee was busy inventing t’internet. .

Anyway, to cut a long story short, an old female friend from Dublin (we lived at 25, they at 37) made a Facebook statement that she was doing a simple survey asking her friends whether they either knew, or give two hoots, about whatever happened with various football teams today, with today being Sunday 13th May.

Myself, I am so au-fait with football that I didn't even know some major teams were playing today, although I do remember a neighbour saying he was washing his car early so he could sit down and watch the motor racing and the match, so I now assume “the match” was something important on the football calendar. Unless the motor racing featured a fight between Bernie Ecclestone’s two wonderful daughters, in particular, the extremely erudite Petra, who, in celebration of her eruditeness, is, I believe, named after a Blue Peter Dog.

Regarding football, I really cannot see what all the fuss is about, following a bunch of spitting, over-acting, overpaid and over here lager-louts, with their fortune-paying sheepish fans. These fans are happy to part with a hard-earned £60 in exchange for a £2 shirt made in Vietnam by some half-blind teenager working 25 hours a day for $6 a week, in order to then advertise drinks and betting companies on the front of it!

Are the fans really that stupid that they are happy to pay to advertise these multimillion corporations on extremely nasty and cheap shirts?

Surely the drinks, betting companies and even the teams themselves should be paying the fans a fee for advertising their brands on their chests, backs or both?

Or at the very least, provide them with the nasty, cheap football shirt replica for free!

Crikey, I wish I could get someone to pay me to provide me with free advertising (if you get my drift)! In fact, this could be the very secret weapon to preserve all those small local daily newspapers that are either going weekly, or going to the wall!

Then, to add insult to strange behaviour, the football fans worry about the teams and their players like a country-wide commune of therapists. Again, on Facebook, I see acres of screen print from otherwise quite intelligent people worrying and fretting about some unintelligent potato head, who, kicking a pig's bladder around a field for a few hours a week, earns in that one week what it takes 8 NHS nurses in the UK, or 8 poor sods in Afghanistan being shot at by moronic weird-beards, to earn in a year!

Football certainly does not in any way contribute to the fabric of my or my family's well-being, neither does it ease my worries.

So while its proponents have to worry about where their next tax fiddle is coming from, or where to crash their £80,000 sports car next, I, frankly, do not give even the slightest toss about it!

Ok. So call me a grumpy old man.

But do the fans not realise they are being taken for a ride, scrimping and saving as they do from their often, just-above minimum wage occupations, to support these multi-millionaires?

Or is it just that the world has gone completely mad?

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