Concussion Ball

Nick Hornby has much to answer for. He has made a living from peddling tedious, overwrought observations on the nature of modern manhood, and inspired a generation of list-making, semi-autistic milquetoasts to pen appalling memoirs about their fractured relationships with their dads and inability to flirt with women.

But in many people’s eyes, Hornby’s greatest crime was ‘Fever Pitch’, his account of life growing up as an Arsenal fan. It was accessible, often amusing, and – crucially – gave a voice to thousands of frustrated middle-class football fans who spent years feeling like interlopers on the terraces. Nice, polite, and thoughtful in a dinner-party kind of way, Fever Pitch is charged with kick-starting the 90s’ popular love-affair with football, which saw it drifting ever further from its traditionally working-class roots.

But one look at the Burberry-capped, mouth-breathing oafs who stormed the pitch after England scored their first goal against Turkey last night (THIS IS NOW DATED) made me realise that the gentrification process doesn’t need to be halted, it needs to speed up.

It is not just the pitch-invading - which was tastefully ignored by the BBC commentary team, even when one fan stuck his heavy-browed face into the camera and began hooting and pumping his fist like an enraged chimp – it is the booing of opposition national anthems, it is the racist chanting. The sad thing is that most of the simpletons bellowing “I’d rather be a paki than Turk” last night probably saw it as some kind of conciliatory gesture to the country’s Asian population: “You pakis aren’t that bad – at least you aren’t greasy Turks!” Then they sway, arm in arm, away from the ground, blithely in search of the nearest kebab or curry house.

So it is time for the rest of us – the thinking football fans of England – to wrest the game back from the sportswear-clad lower order primates, who we see during summer international tournaments rampaging through central European villages, throwing white plastic garden furniture at the windows of tabacceries.

It won’t take much to deter these fools. For instance, if you are on your way to a match and you see a suspect individual – look out for the primitive jaw line, hairy knuckles and Kappa sportswear – distract him with a shiny object, or perhaps one of those pens where, when you click the end, a ladies clothes fall off. You might want to ask him to sign a piece of paper, which you will then unfold to reveal the legend ‘I am gay’. He will then be forced to beat himself to death.

Perhaps ‘gentrification’ is the wrong word. Much as people may wish this to be a class issue, it really isn’t. Nor is it about ‘intellectualisation’, which I associate with bespectacled troglodytes explaining away the mocked-up nude photo of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that acts as their screen saver, or those self-satisfied buffoons with ‘Philosophy Football’ T-Shirts, which have ‘Wittgenstein – 7’ and ‘Kant – 11’ emblazoned on the back (You like football and philosophy? You Renaissance man, you. Here is that medal you clearly feel you deserve.) So I have invented a word – I am calling for the de-goonification of football. We must act together to expunge the racists, the pricks, the scum, the thugs, the oafs, the…the…the…. sorry, I had a bit of a Travis Bickle moment then.

What I am saying is that these people must not be allowed to personify football. And if the Hornby-bashers are worried about the game becoming ‘too respectable’ then we can start a new sport for them and their knuckleheaded pieces of rough to have all for themselves. We’ll call it ‘Concussion-Ball’. It involves a catapult, a solid aluminium ball, and no protective headgear. Can you guess the rules?