Does football bring out the worst in us?
People get very strange about flags.
You notice this in particular if you work for a local paper, especially during a World Cup.
Our local council has not banned the flying of the England flag, but rumours abound of people being told to remove the St George's cross from their homes and car windows, presumably out of fear of upsetting people who don't see themselves as English.
These stories are bogus, but the feeling that gives rise to them must be genuine - insecurity over our national identity.
Patriotism needs an enemy. And yet we don't seem to have one here. Far from discouraging the flying of the flag, politicians fall over themselves to demonstrate their support for it, and for the England team, as if failure to do so makes them seem insufficiently patriotic.
On those rare occasions that I do feel patriotic, it's when we demonstrate the opposite of what patriotism usually involves - a resistance to identity politics, an openness to other cultures.
Football as often as not gives me cause for national shame rather than pride - the seedy behaviour of all too many of its practitioners, the vacuous materialism of 'WAG' culture, the crazy amounts of money involved.
Mix daytime drinking with collective emotion and you're asking for trouble. It's no cause for pride, for instance, that the police see fit to issue reminders to men not to beat up their wives during the World Cup.
Here's an uncommonly colourful quote from a police officer in a local paper: "As England played the USA, our telephone operators saw calls about domestic violence more than double, almost off the scale.
"Another report involved someone being stabbed, another of a man trying to strangle his girlfriend, others of brothers fighting ..."
You're left wondering what sort of place In-ger-lund has become when this is how we react to a game.
Football seems to bring out the worst in people - often otherwise civilised types who should know better.
Robert Crampton wrote in The Times of his shame at finding himself yelling an expletive in a family hotel bar when Robert Green bungled that save in the US game.
Me, I'm too aware of how easy it is to do such a thing. I don't mean to shout insults when children are about (although, heaven knows, that's only human), but to make a hash of things on the pitch.
"Give them a break," I want to remind everyone who shouts insults at the TV when there's a match on. "It's not as easy as it looks."
I was forced to play football in school, and I remember all too vividly every butter-fingered fumbling in goals, every bruising misadventure midfield.
Exasperated cries of "Woolly!" as the ball soared over my head (often, it shames me to say, because I ducked out of its path), will ring in my ears to my dying day.
Granted, you don't tend to see professional footballers ducking out the way of the ball, but I think I know something of how Green felt, and that stops me shouting at him or others in his position.
More evidence, if any were needed, that I'm not cut of for football fandom.
So fly all the flags you like. No-one, I'm afraid, is likely to object.
But don't tell me we have a patriotic duty to back our team.
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Weather for Cleckheaton
Monday 13 February 2012
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Cloudy
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